ive seen this before..who makes this **** up??
Probably just a concept some kid learned in a statistics class and he applied it. I don't know who first recognized the pattern.
Another useful counting too is when trying to find the sum of a consecutive list of numbers, you can take the sum of the first and the last and multiply it by the size of the list divided by two.If you have a remained, add the middle number to the sum.
For example 1+2+..+6+7
1+7 = 8
7/2 = 3.5, so we have a remained and the number in the middle is 4.
8*3 + 4 = 28 voila!
Not too useful for small numbers, but, very useful for large numbers, like if you were trying to find the sum of 1-> 999,999
999,999 + 1 = 1,000,000
Then number between 999,999 and 1 is
[(999,999-1) / 2 ]+1 = 500,000
So, 500,000 * 1,000,000 = 5.0 x 10^11
I believe I did that right....but, imagine tryign to add the numbers up otherwise :| wow