A favorite bit of mathematical lore tells how the boy wonder Carl Friedrich Gauss outwitted a cruel schoolmaster. Assigned the task of summing a long arithmetic series, young Gauss had a flash of insight and invented a shortcut that gave him the answer straightaway, with no need for tedious calculation. The story of Gauss’s triumph has been told many times – I have collected well over 100 versions in several languages – but many questions remain. Was this incident a historical event, or should we see it as something more mythic, like the tale of George Washington and the cherry tree? Where was the story first recorded, and how has it been passed down to us? What does the popularity of this narrative reveal about attitudes toward mathematics and mathematicians? And, perhaps most important, how can we use such tales to inspire (rather than discourage) students who lack Gauss’s genius?

Biography:

Brian Hayes is Senior Writer for American Scientist. Since 1993 he has been writing the “Computing Science” column for the magazine. Earlier, he wrote similar columns for Scientific American, for Computer Language and for The Sciences. From 1972 to 1984 he was an editor of Scientific American; from 1990 to 1992 he was the editor of American Scientist. He has been a visitor at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley and at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste. A collection of Hayes’s columns, titled Group Theory in the Bedroom, and other Mathematical Diversions, was published by Hill and Wang in 2008