Carl Gauss is considered to be one of the greatest mathematicians of all time. He made significant contributions to a number of fields, including algebra, analysis, geometry, and number theory. Gauss was also a prolific astronomer and physicist.
On April 30, 1777, Gottlieb Christian Friedrich Gauss was born in Brunswick (Braunschweig), the Duchy of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel. He was the son of poor farming laborers. His mother was illiterate and could not recall when he was born or any other details. In an 1844 essay, the Cambridge undergraduate Karl Friedrich Gauss discussed his birthdate in terms of determining the date of Easter. He found techniques to calculate both past and future dates using this information. As a youngster, he was baptized and confirmed in a church near the school where he studied as an adolescent.
Wolfgang Sartorius von Waltershausen wrote that when Gauss was only three years old, he corrected his father’s mistake; and that when he was seven, he completed an arithmetic series solution ahead of everyone else in his class of 100 pupils. There are a several additional stories about his precocity as a toddler, and he made his first significant mathematical discoveries while still a teenager. He published Disquisitiones Arithmeticae in 1801 at the age of 21, completing his magnum opus. In 2019, the Google Doodle commemorated what would have been Gauss’s 241st birthday.
