Carl Friedrich Gauss

Carl Friedrich Gauss

The Prince of Mathematics

Carl Friedrich Gauss is considered to be the greatest German mathematician of the nineteenth century. Sometimes he is also called a “prince of mathematics”. Almost all mathematicians consider him to be one of the three greatest, along with Archimedes and Newton, and some consider him to be the greatest of all time, however, he is hardly known to the general public. His works left a lasting mark in the areas of number theory, astronomy, geodesy, and electromagnetism. His greatest work was done in the area of higher arithmetic and number theory. One of the masterpieces of mathematical literature is “Disquisitiones Arithmeticae” that Gauss finished in 1798.

He was born in Brunswick, Germany, on April 30, 1777 to a poor family. On his own as a teenager he began to discover advanced mathematic principles, and at the age of 18 Gauss became the first person to prove the Law of Quadratic Reciprocity, a theory of math that allows us to determine whether quadratic equations can be solved. Later he entered University of Göttingen, his education and early researches were financed by the Duke of Brunswick.

Gauss became widely known in his twenty-fifth year by the publication of the “Disquisitiones Arithmeticae” in 1801. There were seven sections, all but the last section, “Equations Defining Sections of a Circle,” being devoted to number theory. In 1818, Gauss began work that led to research in the field of differential geometry and the writing of significant theories related to the nature of curves and curvature. He published over 70 papers over the next 12 years, including one that won the Copenhagen University Prize. Gauss' was appointed as professor of mathematics and director of the observatory at Gottingen, after developing his methods to determine the orbits of new asteroids, where he remained in his official position until his death on February 23, 1855.

One of his biggest discoveries of Gauss is the “least squares method,” which he first discovered in 1795; however it was officially published in 1809, remaining unrevealed to other mathematicians until then. The method is used for finding a line or curve that best represents a correspondence between two measured quantities. Gauss used calculus techniques to find the minimum of the sum of the squares of the vertical distances of each data point from the proposed line; hence the name of the method is “least square method.” Nowadays, the method is used in almost every scientific field to minimize the effect of measurement errors.

Carl Friedrich Gauss devoted his life to mathematics, particularly achieving a great success in number theory, which he called a “Queen of Mathematics.”  His discoveries were numerous and very important to the mathematics in nineteenth century and modern mathematics as well. His contribution to mathematics is enormous, what makes him to be considered, along with Newton and Archimedes, to be one of the three greatest mathematicians who ever lived.

Bibliography

Bell, E. T. (1986). Men of Mathematics. New York: Touchstone.