Math Tricks

Inspired by a wired article I googled for a Vedic Math tutorial.

I have always found these little math tricks interesting, mainly from the perspective of trying to figure out how they work. I think it is a kind of a mental excersize similar to figuring out a clever optimization algorithm in programming.

Anyway, this Vedic math reminded me of one of my favorite stories about a young Gauss (eminent 19th century contributor to mathematics and statistics) whose math teacher instructed them to add up the numbers from 1 to 100 on their slate to keep them quite and occupied for a while. The story continues that, much to the teacher