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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   32221 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 10, 2025

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The Matura (graduation for the successful completion of higher secondary schooling), awarded to [Einstein] in September 1896, acknowledged him to have performed well across most of the curriculum, allotting him a top grade of 6 for history, physics, algebra, geometry, and descriptive geometry.

Gauss was a child prodigy in mathematics. When the elementary teachers noticed his intellectual abilities, they brought him to the attention of the Duke of Brunswick who sent him to the local Collegium Carolinum,[a] which he attended from 1792 to 1795

None of this sounds like kids who were on the bottom track at school.

Today I learned. Thanks for correcting me. I had heard the Einstein myth around somewhere, and also the (myth?) that Gauss had been forced to add 0-100 to keep him from making trouble in class.

The summation story has an interesting backstory, but it doesn't seem to have been special punishment for Gauss, but rather a standard assignment for all of the students (and the exact nature of the assignment is lost to history).

and also the (myth?) that Gauss had been forced to add 0-100 to keep him from making trouble in class.

I heard that one too, but as the incident showing he's a prodigy, rather than one proving he's a dum-dum troublemaker. Instead of calculating the sum by brute-forcing, he came up with the arithmetic series sum formula on the spot.

Huh, I just did it like this:

001 + 002 + 003 + ... + 049 + 50 + 100
 +     +     +           +
099 + 098 + 097 + ... + 051
--------------------------------------
100 + 100 + 100 + ... + 100 + 50 + 100
--------------------------------------
100 x 49 + 50 + 100 = 4900 + 150 = 5050

Yup, and when you generalize this you get the arithmetic series sum formula. Congrats, you're as smart as 15 (or less) -year-old Gauss.

Nope. I can follow the derivation, but there is no way that would have occurred to me in an hour, or however long his class was. Shota Gauss (who sounds like a great Fate character) is smarter than me.

There's a popular myth that Einstein was bad at school and failed math classes. It is completely false.

IIRC, some other country gives their failing students a grade of "6" and the myth started when someone didn't realize foreign standards were different and mistook his top grade for failure.

It's quite funny that the myth cropped up while Einstein was still alive, and Einstein himself was rather confused about why that myth came to be.

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