Young Gauss just dropped the mathematical mic! While other kids were painfully adding 1+2+3+...+100 one by one, little Carl Friedrich spotted a pattern and paired numbers (1+100, 2+99...) to get 50 pairs of 101. Multiply that by 50 and BAM—5050! The formula N*(N+1)/2 was born!
The pro-gamer move? Instead of brute-forcing calculations like his teacher expected, Gauss hacked the system with elegant mathematical thinking. That's the equivalent of bringing a calculator to a counting contest!