![]() ![]() (Google Books copy is second edition, dated 1920, but first edition was published in 1915.) The additions include three literary genres that had not yet been represented: a one-act play, a treatment of the theme in verse, and a joke!Īhrens, Wilhelm. ![]() Update : Thanks to the further diligent sleuthing of Barry Cipra and others, the collection now has another 20 entries, for a total of 134. Hawking's 2005 book God Created the Integers: The Mathematical Breakthroughs that Changed History. Munro titled Heroes of the Telegraph, and Stephen W. Waldo Dunnington (who also published a book-length biography of Gauss in 1955), a 1997 book by J. Update : Barry Cipra has added three more sources (the total is now 114). Mathé's pamphlet also has the earliest mention of solving the problem by the method of forming pairs. It is the earliest such instance I have found, more than 30 years ahead of Ludwig Beiberbach's account. This last item is particularly notable because it includes the 1-to-100 example. Winnecke, and the third from a 1906 pamphlet authored by Franz Mathé. One comes from a new book by Ian Stewart, another from an 1877 biographical sketch by F. Please send all such materials, and any corrections of the transcriptions found here, to : I have added to the collection three more tellings of the tale (bringing the total to 111). Of particular interest are any versions that predate those of Eric Temple Bell and Ludwig Bieberbach in 19. I would be happy to receive other tellings of the story, in any language, and will attempt to include them in this archive. The versions of the tale presented here are only a sample of those in the worldwide literature. Ivo Schneider of the Bundeswehr University, Munich, offered advice on interpreting the documentary record of Gauss's early life (but obviously he is not to be held responsible for my interpretations). Margaret Tent of the Altamont School in Birmingham, Alabama, shared passages from her new biography of Gauss ( The Prince of Mathematics: Carl Friedrich Gauss) in advance of publication. Johannes Berg of the University of Cologne and Stephan Mertens of the University of Magdeburg helped me in this curious pursuit by supplying documents I could not obtain in the U.S. Especial thanks to Carolina Grey at Johns Hopkins and Mary Linn Wernet in Natchitoches. Holyoke College, Johns Hopkins University, the Library of Congress, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, The New York Public Library, the University of North Carolina, North Carolina State University, Northwestern State University in Natchitoches, Mississippi, and the Wake County (North Carolina) Public Library. My thanks to the librarians of the following institutions: Boston College, the Boston Public Library, Boston University, Brown University, Duke University, Mt. I would not have thought to look for the Gauss story in PHP and PostgreSQL: Advanced Web Programming or in a book titled Puzzles of Finance: Six Practical Problems and their Remarkable Solutions. Whatever the outcome of that dispute, I can report that Google Book Search led me to many works I would never have found by any other means. This service has been controversial because some authors and publishers maintain it infringes their copyrights. Another invaluable resource was the Google Book Search. I tried various combinations of search terms such as "Gauss," "Büttner," "slates," and "progression" (or their equivalents in other languages). On the World Wide Web, search engines offered a very efficient means of locating versions of the story. Wilmington, Dela.: Scholarly Resources.) To broaden the search I thumbed through various well-known works on the history of mathematics and collections of mathematical anecdotes, and I browsed in literature on the teaching of mathematics. I began with biographies of Gauss, then followed references mentioned by the biographers, and I was also guided by the major Gauss bibliography assembled by Uta C. Many were found through conventional methods of library research. Transcribed below are 109 tellings of the story about Carl Friedrich Gauss's boyhood discovery of the "trick" for summing an arithmetic progression.Ī word about how I collected these accounts: ![]() Versions of the Gauss Schoolroom Anecdote Collected by Brian Hayes (with a lot of help from my friends) ![]()
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