Death of Carl Friedrich Gauss

Carl Friedrich Gauss died on 23 February 1855 in Göttingen, aged 77. 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.

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