Famous Mathematicians: Gauss Traditional Cache
MathProfessor: Cache is gone, so Gauss is going to retire.
Famous Mathematicians: Gauss
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The seventh of a series of caches along HWY 89 South of Meyers. The cache is a small, camo'd container located at the intersection of HWY 89 and South Upper Truckee Rd. Park in the pull out and watch for traffic. Cache may be hard to access in the winter.
Carl Friedrich Gauss was one of greatest mathematicians of all time. His work advanced many fields, primarily Number Theory. His work included proving the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra, creating modular arithmetic, proposing the Prime Number Theorem, and first suggesting non-Euclidean geometries. Gauss also did a lot for Physics with his study of planetary motion and electricity.
Gauss was a child prodigy (his Ph.D. was earned at age 21), and there is a story of his genius being shown at an early age. Because Gauss was so intelligent, he was often bored in school and thus acted out. His teacher, hoping to keep the boy busy, told Gauss to add the numbers 1 to 100. Gauss came back with an answer quickly, much to the teacher’s dismay. Young Carl had figured out that he could find the sum by taking the original numbers and adding the same list in reverse (1+100, 2+99, 3+98, etc). This would give him 100 terms of 101 which total 100*101=10100. Dividing by 2 (because he added the list twice) gave 5050. This same technique was used to generate the sum for any arithmetic sequence that we still teach today.
Additional Hints
(Decrypt)
onexvat hc gur evtug gerr
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