Gauss, Carl Friedrich (1777–1855)

Gauss, who was born April 30, 1777, in Brunswick, Germany, the child of a poor family, was a prodigy who became famous for his advances in many branches of science, but he was, above all else, a mathematician.

Mathematics came naturally to Gauss, who is said to have corrected his father's wage calculations when he was aged three. Early evidence of his ability was provided by his speedy answer to the request by his schoolteacher to sum the numbers from 1 to 100. He saw immediately that each of (1 + 100), (2 + 99), … summed to 101 and thus the answer was 5050. He had invented the formula for himself, and this was typical of his early career—he was frequently inventing results and discovering later that these results had been found before. Gauss's ability came to the attention of the Duke of Brunswick, who became his patron and sent him, in 1795, to the University of Göttingen. It was only a matter of time before Gauss outdid his predecessors: In 1796, he showed that it would be possible, using ruler and compasses only, to construct a regular figure with

sides for any integer n.

In 1801, Gauss summarized his discoveries of the previous 5 years in Disquisitiones Arithmeticae, a masterpiece that immediately established him as the foremost living mathematician. Turning to astronomy, Gauss next developed new methods for calculating the motions of planets. This was spectacularly confirmed by his ability to predict where astronomers should search for the minor planet Ceres. Gauss's achievement was based on his development of the method of least squares and the use of an error distribution now known variously as the normal or Gaussian distribution. The procedures were set out in his 1809 work Theoria Motus Corporum Coelestium in sectionibus conicis solem ambientium.

In 1805, Gauss was happily married to Johanna Ostoff, and he soon had a son and daughter. In 1807, the family moved to Göttingen, where Gauss was [Page 386]appointed director of the observatory. In 1809, Johanna died in childbirth, and the following year, Gauss married her best friend, Minna Waldeck, although it appears that this marriage was not a happy one.

Gauss's astronomical work resulted in inventions such as the heliotrope, an instrument for accurate direction-finding by means of reflected sunlight. Gauss also experimented with magnetometers; photometers; and, some 5 years before Samuel Morse, the telegraph. He died peacefully at Göttingen in the early morning of February 23, 1855.