Not homework but classwork ...

From someone at College Confidential http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/14975348-post85.html

"I am not claiming to have any special ability, but when I was in the third grade in a small school in Hellhole, Texas, I received a similar assignment to the one Gauss received and came up with a similar solution in a couple of minutes. But when I showed my teacher my solution in Hellhole, she screamed at me and called me lazy and told me to do it the long way like the other children. If Gauss had grown up in a place like Hellhole, it's quite possible we would never have heard of him."

Gauss was given the problem of computing

1 + 2 + ... + 100

and figured out that it equals 50 * (1 + 100) = 5050.