Birth of Carl Friedrich Gauss

Carl Friedrich Gauss was born on 30 April 1777 in Brunswick. A German mathematician and physicist, Gauss showed prodigious ability as a child and published his major work on number theory, the Disquisitiones Arithmeticae, at the age of twenty-four. He calculated the orbit of the dwarf planet Ceres from only a few observations, using the method of least squares. He made fundamental contributions to algebra, geometry, statistics, astronomy and the study of magnetism and electricity, and he introduced the bell-shaped normal distribution to the analysis of errors. For most of his career he was a professor and director of the observatory at Göttingen. He is often called the prince of mathematicians.

Open on the timeline