Rocky Point High School math teacher Jay Rand likes to challenge his students with a classic head-scratcher on the first day of class: Sum up the digits from 1 to 100, without counting.

But first, he tells them about 19th century German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss, who famously came up with the quickest solution while still in elementary school. “Your challenge is to figure out how he did it,” Rand tells his students.

Most can’t, but that’s the point, Rand said: “The lesson is that problem solvers don’t always get the solution, but they don’t give up either.”

Rand, 50, who grew up in Rocky Point, has a bachelor’s degree in math education from LIU Post in Brookville and masters’ degrees from Stony Brook University and Queens College. He lives in Southold and began teaching at Roc

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