Gauss did indeed figure this out at the age of 8 .. a teacher had given her unruly class the "busywork" problem of summing the first 100 integers. Gauss is also notorious for catching errors in his father's bookkeeping at an even earlier age. This from A Biography of Gauss

In reply to RE: Sum of numbers between 1 and N by husker
in thread Recursion by lolindrath

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