Help! Someone explain what's funny about this:
"At the age of seven, Carl Friedrich Gauss started elementary school, and his potential was noticed almost immediately.
Quoted in the MacTutor History of Mathematics archive "

I found this:
At the age of seven, Carl Friedrich Gauss started elementary school, and his potential was noticed almost immediately. His teacher, Büttner, and his assistant, Martin Bartels, were amazed when Gauss summed the integers from 1 to 100 instantly by spotting that the sum was 50 pairs of numbers each pair summing to 101.

And later I found that it is an in joke for students of Gauss, who developed a Theory of Potentials. Or something like that. Not many mathematicians are humorists.