[vidarh]

Often it's also simply just that people are not used to thinking about more efficient ways of solving a problem.

There's a (quite possibly apocryphal) story about Niels Henrik Abel in primary school, where his teacher supposedly wanted time to do some grading and assigned the students the busywork of adding up all numbers from 1 to 100. Abel supposedly quickly found the well known formula n(n+1)/2 and gave the teacher the answer within minutes, and the teacher supposedly believed he'd somehow "cheated" because he could not imagine any of them could figure it out.

I have no idea if the story is real (I grew up in Norway, so Abel was a popular subject for stories like this) - it was told to me in high school by a maths teacher after giving us the modified task of seeing if we could find any shortcuts to doing the sums, and seeing what we'd come up with. I found the formula quickly, but at that age that's nothing special, especially not when prompted to find an alternative solution.

But the overall idea the teacher was trying to get us to understand was how to pause and think about how to decompose a problem rather than just picking the most obvious alternative, and learning to be "lazy" in the sense of relentlessly looking for an easier way to do things is a large part of what got me into software development..

[fingerlocks]

When I heard this story it was about Gauss.

And I looked it up- Yes, the same possibly apocryphal story is on his Wikipedia page: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Friedrich_Gauss

[vidarh]

Interesting. Not surprised this is the kind of story people might have adapted rather freely to sound more familiar to a local audience...