Carl Friedrich Gauss
1777–1855, Brunswick, Duchy of Brunswick (now Germany), Göttingen, Kingdom of Hanover (now Germany)
German mathematician and astronomer, often called the Prince of Mathematicians, whose Disquisitiones Arithmeticae founded modern number theory and who made fundamental contributions to differential geometry, statistics and geodesy.
Gauss was born into a poor family in Brunswick and showed prodigious calculating talent as a child; the Duke of Brunswick financed his education after being told of the boy's gifts. At the University of Göttingen he made a string of major discoveries as a teenager, including the construction of the regular 17-gon by ruler and compass in 1796, and in 1801 he published Disquisitiones Arithmeticae, which reorganised number theory as a coherent discipline. That same year he became famous for correctly predicting the position of the asteroid Ceres using a new method of least squares.
From 1807 Gauss directed the Göttingen Observatory, where he remained for the rest of his life. His Theorema Egregium (1827) showed that the curvature of a surface is an intrinsic property, founding differential geometry, and his geodesic survey work led him to invent the heliotrope. He corresponded with Sophie Germain on number theory and privately anticipated non-Euclidean geometry decades before it was published by others, though he never published his own findings on the subject for fear of controversy. He died in Göttingen in 1855.
Workplaces: University of Göttingen Observatory
Germany