Sunday, February 3, 2008

Rainbow method

Here is an explanation of the rainbow method.

The idea is as follows:

You can add a series of consecutive numbers (means the difference is the same:
like 2+4+6+...100 (difference 3) or
5+ 10 + 15 +....+1000 (difference 5) etc. by making bows where each bow consists of two numbers: first + last, then second + one before the last etc.

Thus all you need to do is to multiply that sum (first+last) times the numbers of bows which is half of the number of numbers.

Example:
3+6+9+12+15 has 2.5 bows and each bow equals 18 so the answer is 45 (you can verify)

or another example:
15+25+35+....1005 has 100 bows and each bow has the same sum of 1020 so the answer is 102,000

Remark. It is good if you play with small lists to practice the method. Like 2+4+6+8+10 or 5+10+15+20+25+30 to get the "feel"

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

One of your examples is wrong. 15+25+35...+1005 only has 50 bows. [not 100 like you say] 50 x 1020 is 51000.

shanana said...

omg NOT wat i wanted @ all!!!!!!!!!

Unknown said...

wow and the difference is 2 not 3

Nick said...

wow... I want foil(another word for rainbow method) with 2 digit numbers.