The Professor

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/onword/2009/01/15/translated-by-hosted-by-shaindel-beers

The link above is Oregon poet Shiandel Beers interview with the translator.  We are studying imaginary numbers.  I also ran into this imaginary number in the book 'The Professor and the House Keeper".  The professor wrote down e to the power of pie times i + 1 = 0.  e stands for Eurler's constant.  The Professor speaks about looking into 'God's Notebook'.  The professor specializes in prime numbers.  He talks about twin primes.  One of the problem he gave to the boy is to add from the number 1 to number 10.  This adds up 55.  Then he has a formula for this with out having to add every number.  You can do this for 1 to 100.  The formula:  
The Professor mentions an amicable number.  The first few amicable pairs are: (220, 284)  Amicable numbers are two different numbers so related that the sum of the proper divisors of each is equal to the other. (A proper divisor of a number is a positive integer divisor other than the number itself.  10x10+1divided by 2 = 55;  100x101/2= 5050; 1000 x 1001 divided by 2 =  500500.  The formula is n x n+1 divided by 2.

update:  6.2.10  found the person who discovered the number series that was illustrated in the book 'The Housekeeper and the Professor'.

Another famous story has it that in primary school his teacher, J.G. Büttner, tried to occupy pupils by making them add a list of integers in arithmetic progression; as the story is most often told, these were the numbers from 1 to 100. The young Gauss reputedly produced the correct answer within seconds, to the astonishment of his teacher and his assistant Martin Bartels.

Gauss's presumed method was to realize 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. However, the details of the story are at best uncertain (see ^[6] for discussion of the original Wolfgang Sartorius von Waltershausen source and the changes in other versions); some authors, such as Joseph Rotman in his book A first course in Abstract Algebra, question whether it ever happened. - wikipeia.