Gauss, (Johann) Carl Friedrich 1777-1855
German mathematician, astronomer and physicist

Born in Brunswick to poor parents, he came to the notice of the Duke of Brunswick who paid for his education at the Collegium Carolinum, Brunswick, and the University of G�ttingen. A notebook kept in Latin by him as a youth and discovered in 1898 showed that, from the age of 15, he had conjectured and often proved many remarkable results, including the prime number theorem. In 1796 he announced that he had found a ruler and compass construction for the 17-sided polygon, and in 1801 published his Disquisitiones arithmeticae, containing wholly new advances in number theory. The same year he was the first to rediscover the asteroid Ceres found by Giuseppe Piazzi in 1800 and since lost behind the Sun. In 1807 he became director of G�ttingen Observatory, while studying celestial mechanics (on which he published a treatise in 1809), and statistics, where he was the first to use the method of least squares. From 1818 to 1825 he directed the geodetic survey of Hanover, and this and his astronomical work involved him in much heavy routine calculation, leading to his study of the theory of errors of observation. He also worked on pure mathematics,including differential equations, the hypergeometric function, the curvature of surfaces, four different proofs of the fundamental theorem of algebra, six of quadratic reciprocity and much else in number theory. In physics he studied the Earth's magnetism and developed the magnetometer in conjunction with Wilhelm Eduard Weber, and gave a mathematical theory of the optical systems of lenses. Manuscripts unpublished until long after his death show that he had made many other discoveries, including the theory of elliptic functions that had been published independently by Niels Henrik Abel and Carl Gustav Jacobi, and had come to accept the possibility of a non-Euclidean geometry of space, first published by J�nos Bolyai and Nikolai Lobachevski in the 1820s.

Bibliography: G Waldo Duddington, Carl Friedrich Gauss: Titan of Science (1955)