Math Special Lecture

The Bricklayer's Challenge and Other Simple But Unsolved Problems

A famous (albeit partly aprocryphal) story has Gauss as a schoolboy speedily adding the numbers 1 to 100. When the speaker pondered how he might have approached the same assignment, he stumbled into an unsolved problem that might have tested Gauss himself. We will look at what little progress has been made toward solving the “Bricklayer’s Challenge,”