Fermat’s Library shares interesting facts on LinkedIn. Here is one of them. In the 1780s a German schoolteacher gave his 8-year-olds a problem to keep them busy. He asked them to add up all the numbers from 1 to 100: 1 + 2 + 3 + … + 98 + 99 + 100 = ?

One student came up with the answer in just 2 minutes. The boy told the teacher that he had just “folded” the numbers so that 1 joins with 100, 2 joins with 99… Each pair of numbers added up to 101. He counted 50 pairs of numbers and so he multiplied 50 by 101 which gave him the answer 5050.

That boy’s name was Carl Friedrich Gauss.