A Brief Biography of Carl Friedrich Gauss

Carl Friedrich Gauss is revered as a very important man in the world of mathematicians. The discoveries he completed while he was alive contributed to many areas of mathematics like geometry, statistics, number theory, statistics, and more. Gauss was an extremely brilliant mathematician and that is precisely why he is remembered all through today. Although Gauss left many contributions in each of the aforementioned fields, two of his discoveries in the fields of mathematics and astronomy seem to have had the most tremendous effect on modern day mathematics.

Carl Friedrich Gauss was born April 30, 1777 in Brunswick, Germany to a stern father and a loving mother. At a young age, his mother sensed how intelligent her son was and insisted on sending him to school to develop even though his dad displayed much resistance to the idea. The first test of Gauss’ brilliance was at age ten in his arithmetic class when the teacher asked the students to find the sum of all whole numbers 1 to 100. In his mind, Gauss was able to connect that 1+100=101, 2+99=101, and so on, deducing that all 50 pairs of numbers would equal 101. By this logic all Gauss had to do was multiply 50 by 101 and get his answer of 5,050. Gauss was bound to the mathematics field when at the age of 14, Gauss met the Duke of Brunswick. The duke was so astounded by Gauss’ photographic memory that he financially supported him through his studies at Caroline College and other universities afterwards. A major feat that Gauss had while he was enrolled college helped him decide that he wanted to focus on studying mathematics as opposed to languages. Besides his life of math, Gauss also had six children, three with Johanna Osthoff and three with his first deceased wife’s best fri...

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...Gauss was an incredible mathematician that founded ideas in the fields of geometry, statistics, number theory, statistics, and more. He was able to change the attitudes of mathematicians everywhere with his curious, but brilliant and logical mind and find solutions to problems they have had for hundreds of years. His work is so important and useful that it is still used today in math fields and classes everywhere. The inclusion of Gauss in the history of mathematics is an important one and without his exceptional mind modern day math would be almost entirely different than it is.

Works Cited

Imports, N. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.rare-earth-magnets.com/t-johann-carl-friedrich- gauss.aspx

Mastin, L. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.storyofmathematics.com/19th_gauss.html

Weller, K. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.math.wichita.edu/history/men/gauss.html