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Fact of the day

ACCORDING to legend, while he was at primary school, the great German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss and his classmates were set the task of adding every number from 1 to 100. The teacher assumed this would keep the pupils busy for a while, but Gauss almost immediately announced that the answer was 5,050. He had realised that the list consists of 50 pairs that add up to 101 - for example, 1+100, 2+99, 3+98, and so on. This makes the answer 50 x 101 = 5,050.