Gauss, Karl Friedrich (1777-1855)

Appeared in: Lecture 5

Johann Karl Friedrich Gauss, born in 1777 in Braunschweig, Germany, was one of the most prolific and influential mathematicians in history, in spite of the fact that he was a perfectionist and did not publish many of his discoveries. He made lasting contributions not just to number theory, geometry, and calculus, but also physics and astronomy.

Possibly the best-known anecdote about him happened when his elementary school teacher asked his class to sum the numbers from 1 to 100, and instead he figured out a general formula for summing consecutive integers, which he used to come up with the answer very quickly.

Although he was certainly brilliant, he was often described as mean by his colleagues and students at Göttingen University, where he spent most of his career. Sometimes when students shared their work with him, he would tell them that he had done it all before. Even if he had, there is no question he dampened many people's enthusiasm for math with his arrogance. One notable exception was the French mathematician Sophie Germain , who corresponded with Gauss under the pen name Antoine-August Le Blanc, because women were not allowed in mathematics. Gauss was very impressed with Germain's work, giving her encouragement throughout her life and even speaking very highly of her when he later found out that she was a woman.

One of Gauss' better known results is the Prime Number Theorem, which, given any natural number n, estimates the number of primes below that number as n / log n. He also discovered Non-Euclidean Geometry, though he never published anything on it for fear of ridicule. When Gauss died, he was widely venerated by his contemporaries and they called him the "prince of mathematics".

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Gauss photo taken from Eric's Treasure Troves

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