Question

Use the method of Gauss to find the sum.1+2+3+.....+400

Answer 1

Gauss' method for addition relies on the fact that you can 'pair' certain numbers together. Look at the example:

1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8+9+10

We could manually add all these together from left to right but a clever way to think about this is if we add together the ends of the sum (10+1) we get 11. If we then move one in from the ends and add these (2+9) we also get 11. This means that 1+2+...+9+10 is the same as 11+11+...+11+11.

Because each 2 numbers adds to 11 we know the total number of 11's we have to add together is the length of the sum divided by 2. In our case 5 (10 ÷ 2). We need to add 5 lots of 11 to get our answer. This is the same as 11 × 5 which is easily seen to be 55.

(If you add the 10 numbers together on a calculator you'll see 1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8+9+10 = 55) so this method really makes it a lot quicker.

Looking at your sequence, if we pair the ends together we get 401 (400+1) and we multiply this by the length of the sequence divided by 2. In your case, 200 (400 ÷ 2).

So the sum of all the numbers from 1 to 400 must be 401 × 200 = 80,200.

Remember the steps:
1. Pair the ends together and add them
2. Times this number by the length of the sequence halved

Hope this helps.