A Puzzle For The Weekend,

it is commonly known as Bernoulli's numbers, and is a maths puzzel that dates back some 300 years basicaly, Bernoulli's numbers play an important and quite mysterious role in mathematics and in various places like analysis, number theory and differential topology, they first appeared in Ars Conjectandi, page 97, a famous (and posthumous) treatise published in 1713, by Jakob Bernoulli (1654-1705) when he studied the sums of powers of consecutive integers, the Bernoulli numbers Bn play an important role in several topics of mathematics, these numbers can be defined by the power series where all numbers Bn are zero with odd index n > 1, the even-indexed rational numbers Bn alternate in sign, the first values are

sum of consecutive integer powers, Jakob Bernoulli introduced a sequence of rational numbers, later called Bernoulli numbers, to compute the sum of consecutive integer powers, this formula is given by and so on, well in case you can not work it out all is not lost, an Iraqi-born 16-year-old reportedly has cracked the puzzle, Mohamed Altoumaimi, who immigrated to Sweden six years ago, took only four months to find a formula that explains a sequence of calculations known as the Bernoulli numbers, a code that had stumped some of the best experts in the field, Agence France-Presse reported, Altoumaimi said after his high school teachers were skeptical about his work he contacted professors at Uppsala University, one of Sweden's top institutions, who confirmed his formula was correct and offered him a place at the university, AFP reported, enough of maths, it has given me a headache, and I still can not see the answer!