Carl Friedrich Gauss

Carl Friedrich Gauss was a German mathematician and a physicist who is also titled as ²the Princeps mathematicorum², meaning ²the Prince of Mathematicians² or ²the foremost of mathematicians² and ²greatest mathematician since antiquity² in Latin. He made great contribution to various fields like algebra, number theory, analysis, statistics, geophysics, differential geometry, optics, electrostatics and astronomy.

Carl Friedrich Gauss, born to a poor father and an illiterate mother, solved the puzzle of his own birth date and declared it to be 30 April 1777. Gauss was a genius since his childhood.

Carl Friedrich Gauss has proved his mathematical prowess and prodigy when he created his first major discovery at such a young age. When he was 21, he wrote his magnum opus entitled Disquisitiones Arithmeticae(²Arithmetical Investigations²), a foundational textbook that laid out the tenets of number theory (the study of whole numbers). This work was essential for building up number theory and has curved the field to the current period.

The local duke recognised his talent and sent him to the Collegium Carolinum before he went the most prestigious mathematical university across the globe, Göttingen. When he graduated at the age of 22 in 1798, he started developing his mathematical ideas especially on number theory, discussing the prime numbers. Without number theory, you could kiss computers goodbye. Computers operate, on the most basic level, using just two digits - 1 and 0, and many of the advancements that we’ve made in using computers to solve problems are solved using number theory. Gauss was prolific, and his work on number theory was just a small part of his contribution to math; you can find his influence throughout algebra, statistics, geometry, optics, astronomy and many other subjects that underlie our modern world. He referred mathematics as Queen of all sciences and brought in the concept of Gaussian gravitational constant into physics, and proved Algebra’s fundamental theorem before he was 24.

In the 18^th century he proved the possibility of a 17 sided regular polygon with the help of a ruler and compass only.

He worked hard until his death, some of his students were very influenced by him such as Bernhard Riemann, Richard Dedekind and Friedrich Bessel, who themselves became great mathematicians in their lives.

In 1855, Gauss expired in Göttingen, Hannover (now part of Lower Saxony, Germany) and was cremated in Albanifriedhof. After a study of his brain by Rudolf Wagner, it was known that Gauss’s brain had a mass of 1,492 grams and the cerebral area was 219,588 mm² (340.362 square inches), proving that Gauss was a real genius!

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