• bisby@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    I had the same reaction originally though, because I feel like I had seen this previously as just “bending” the list of 1-100 in half.

    1+2+3+4+...+49+50
    100+99+98+97+...+52+51
    =
    101+101+101+...
    

    101 * 50.

    So you have to do a bit more thinking to define your equation but the equation takes you straight to S instead of 2S.

    And since the meme just has + ... instead of showing where the end of the list was, I see how one could easily mix up the 2 approaches.