The Seven Year Old Noticed a Pattern
I heard that when Carl Friedrich Gauss, the famous German mathematician and physicist was in elementary school, his class was assigned the “busy work” task of adding all the numbers from one to a hundred.
It was one plus two plus three, and so on until 100. This usually kept the class quiet for half an hour or so.
Seven-year-old Carl was sitting quietly with the correct answer while the rest of the class was just starting, so the surprised teacher asked him how he came up with the solution.
He replied that he added one and 100 and got 101. Then he added two and 99, and got 101, three plus 98 and got 101, and so on. He realized there was a pattern of 50 pairs of numbers with each pair adding up to 101.
So, 50 times 101 was 5050, the correct answer. Credit: Reddit/I_think_therefore_i_