04/30/2025
Today is Carl Friedrich Gauss's birthday.🎂🎉🥳
As an elementary student, Gauss and his class were tasked by their teacher, J.G. Büttner, to sum the numbers from 1 to 100. Much to Büttner's surprise, Gauss replied with the correct answer of 5050 in a vastly faster time than expected. Gauss had realised that the sum could be rearranged as 50 pairs of 101 (1+100=101, 2+99=101, etc). Thus, he simply multiplied 50 by 101.
In his doctoral thesis from 1799, Gauss proved the fundamental theorem of algebra which states that every non-constant single-variable polynomial with complex coefficients has at least one complex root.
