Fibonacci solved the Arithmetic Series before Gauss!

There is a famous story about the German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss. As
told by Brian Hayes in The American Scientist,

In the 1780s a provincial German schoolmaster gave his class the tedious assignm
ent of summing the first 100 integers. The teacher's aim was to keep the kids qu
iet for half an hour, but one young pupil almost immediately produced an answer:
1 + 2 + 3 + ... + 98 + 99 + 100 = 5,050. The smart aleck was Carl Friedrich Gau
ss, who would go on to join the short list of candidates for greatest mathematic
ian ever. Gauss was not a calculating prodigy who added up all those numbers in
his head. He had a deeper insight: If you "fold" the series of numbers in the mi
ddle and add them in pairs 1 + 100, 2 + 99, 3 + 98, and so on all the pairs sum to 1
01. There are 50 such pairs, and so the grand total is simply 50×101. The more gen
eral formula, for a list of consecutive numbers from 1 through n, is n(n + 1)/2.

The first method presented in Chapter 12 of Liber Abaci is how to calculate an a

rithmetic series. He gives the same solution as Gauss. I do not claim that Gauss
learned it by reading Fibonacci's book. I expect he re-discovered it himself, m
uch to his credit. It is worth knowing, however, that the formula was known perh
aps 1,000 years before Gauss presented it to his teacher.