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November 30, 2006
X=N(N+1)/2
Today we give thanks to Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855), a brilliant mathematician.
Gauss was born in Brunswick, in the Duchy of Brunswick-Lüneburg (now part of Lower Saxony, Germany), as the only son of uneducated lower-class parents. According to legend, his gifts became very apparent at the age of three when he corrected, in his head, an error his father had made on paper while calculating finances.
[A] famous story, and one that has evolved in the telling, has it that in primary school his teacher, J.G. Büttner tried to occupy pupils by making them add up the integers from 1 to 100. The young Gauss produced the correct answer within seconds by a flash of mathematical insight, to the astonishment of all. Gauss had realized that pairwise addition of terms from opposite ends of the list yielded identical intermediate sums: 1 + 100 = 101, 2 + 99 = 101, 3 + 98 = 101, and so on, for a total sum of 50 × 101 = 5050 (see arithmetic series and summation). (For more information, see [1] for discussion of original Wolfgang Sartorius von Waltershausen source.)
Now what, you may be asking yourself, does this have to do with crossfit?
Well, when a workout such as "Linda" with 10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1 reps comes up, it gives you an easy way to calculate the number of reps in the workout. Using the example of Linda, X=10(10+1)/2, so X=55. This works for any such scheme.
Thanks to Sam L. for bringing this to our attention.
Posted by Max Lewin at November 30, 2006 7:47 AM
Comments
The silly string thing is amazing.
Does anyone want to take up a collection for the string cause?
See you tomorrow.
Posted by: Chad Lott at December 1, 2006 12:37 PM
found this site today. it's pretty awesome. this is the kind of stuff i was into before crossfit.
http://www.oldtimestrongman.com/
Posted by: Jonathan at December 1, 2006 1:40 PM
Yeah, that's pretty good stuff, Jonathan.
Pavel (and others familiar with the old-time iron game) has always raved about Eugene Sandow in his writing (I think he even wrote a little blurb about him in Power to the People, but it's been a long time since I've read my copy and I could be misremembering).
Posted by: Mike Minium at December 1, 2006 3:19 PM
Mike and I were talking about making strongman stuff once we have our own place.
Posted by: Max Lewin at December 1, 2006 4:36 PM