In primary school, after he had misbehaved, his teacher asked him to add all the numbers from 1 to 100. He answered in a few seconds after realizing that the pairwise addition of terms from opposite ends of the list yielded identical intermediate sums: 1 + 100 = 101, 2 + 99 = 101, 3 + 98 = 101, and so on, for a total sum of 50 × 101 = 5050. About which German genius, regarded as the greatest mathematician since antiquity is this possibly apocryphal story often told?
Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855)