section_path: Anecdotes
section_name: Anecdotes
paragraph_text: Anecdotes
  
  Several stories of his early genius have been reported. Carl Friedrich Gauss's mother had never recorded the date of his birth, remembering only that he had been born on a Wednesday, eight days before the Feast of the Ascension, which occurs 39 days after Easter. Gauss later solved this puzzle about his birthdate in the context of finding the date of Easter, deriving methods to compute the date in both past and future years.
  
  In his memorial on Gauss, Wolfgang Sartorius von Waltershausen tells a story about the three-year-old Gauss, who corrected a math error his father made. The most popular story, also told by Sartorius, tells of a school exercise: the teacher Büttner and his assistant Martin Bartels ordered students to add an arithmetic series. Out of about a hundred pupils, Gauss was the first to solve the problem correctly by a significant margin. Although (or because) Sartorius gave no details, over time many versions of this story have been created, with more and more details regarding the nature of the series – the most frequent being the classical problem of adding together all the integers from 1 to 100 – and the circumstances in the classroom.