Carl Friedrich Gauss

Carl Friedrich Gauss was a German mathematician. He is said to be one of the most influential mathematicians of all time, and is sometimes known as “the greatest mathematician since Antiquity.” His work in the number theory, statistics, and geometry has changed the ways of math.
Gauss was born in 1777 in Germany to poor, working class parents. At an early age, people in Gauss’ life realized that he was a child prodigy. He amazed his parents by learning how to add numbers before he could even talk. In elementary school he astonished his teacher by realizing that pairwise addition of terms from opposite ends of a list 1-100 yielded the identical sum of 101. This was an extremely advanced finding for an elementary school child. He made many groundbreaking discoveries when he was only a teenager. He wrote his most influential work, Disquisitiones Arithmeticae, when he was only 21 years old. He was a perfectionist and a very hard worker, known for not publishing a work until it had been criticized by many and considered complete. His life motto was “pauca sed matura” which means “few, but ripe” in Latin. He was also known for being a mental calculator. Since he was also an astrologist, he was able to calculate the trajectory of certain star formations using logarithms in his head.   The Duke of Braunschweig was extremely impressed by the intellect of Gauss and awarded him a scholarship to the University of Gottingen. While in the University, he completed several important breakthroughs that changed math. In 1796, he was able to prove that any regular polygon with a Fermat prime number of sides can be constructed with a compass and a straight edge. Construction had been a problem for mathematicians since the ancient Greeks, and it was finally solved by Gauss. This was a major turning point in Gauss’ life; this discovery made him chose to major in mathematics in college rather than philosophy. He was so pleased with the result of his discovery that he requested a...