Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss (/ɡaʊs/; German: Gauß [ˈkaʁl ˈfʁiːdʁɪç ˈɡaʊs] (About

this soundlisten);[1][2] Latin: Carolus Fridericus Gauss; (30 April 1777 – 23

February 1855) was a German mathematician and physicist who made significant
contributions to many fields in mathematics and sciences.[3] Sometimes referred to
as the Princeps mathematicorum[4] (Latin for "the foremost of mathematicians") and
"the greatest mathematician since antiquity", Gauss had an exceptional influence in
many fields of mathematics and science, and is ranked among history's most
influential mathematicians.[5]

Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss was born on 30 April 1777 in Brunswick (Braunschweig),
in the Duchy of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel (now part of Lower Saxony, Germany), to
poor, working-class parents.[6] His mother was illiterate and never recorded the
date of his birth, remembering only that he had been born on a Wednesday, eight
days before the Feast of the Ascension (which occurs 39 days after Easter). Gauss
later solved this puzzle about his birthdate in the context of finding the date of
Easter, deriving methods to compute the date in both past and future years.[7] He
was christened and confirmed in a church near the school he attended as a child.[8]

Gauss was a child prodigy. In his memorial on Gauss, Wolfgang Sartorius von
Waltershausen says that when Gauss was barely three years old he corrected a math
error his father made; and that when he was seven, he confidently solved an
arithmetic series problem faster than anyone else in his class of 100 students.[9]
Many versions of this story have been retold since that time with various details
regarding what the series was – the most frequent being the classical problem of
adding all the integers from 1 to 100.[10][11][12] There are many other anecdotes
about his precocity while a toddler, and he made his first groundbreaking
mathematical discoveries while still a teenager. He completed his magnum opus,
Disquisitiones Arithmeticae, in 1798, at the age of 21—though it was not published
until 1801.[13] This work was fundamental in consolidating number theory as a
discipline and has shaped the field to the present day.

Gauss's intellectual abilities attracted the attention of the Duke of Brunswick,

[10][5] who sent him to the Collegium Carolinum (now Braunschweig University of
Technology),[10] which he attended from 1792 to 1795,[14] and to the University of
Göttingen from 1795 to 1798.[13] While at university, Gauss independently
rediscovered several important theorems.[15] His breakthrough occurred in 1796 when
he showed that a regular polygon can be constructed by compass and straightedge if
the number of its sides is the product of distinct Fermat primes and a power of 2.
[a] This was a major discovery in an important field of mathematics; construction
problems had occupied mathematicians since the days of the Ancient Greeks, and the
discovery ultimately led Gauss to choose mathematics instead of philology as a
career. Gauss was so pleased with this result that he requested that a regular
heptadecagon be inscribed on his tombstone. The stonemason declined, stating that
the difficult construction would essentially look like a circle.[16]

The year 1796 was productive for both Gauss and number theory. He discovered a
construction of the heptadecagon on 30 March.[13][17] He further advanced modular
arithmetic, greatly simplifying manipulations in number theory. On 8 April he
became the first to prove the quadratic reciprocity law. This remarkably general
law allows mathematicians to determine the solvability of any quadratic equation in
modular arithmetic. The prime number theorem, conjectured on 31 May, gives a good
understanding of how the prime numbers are distributed among the integers.

Gauss also discovered that every positive integer is representable as a sum of at

most three triangular numbers on 10 July and then jotted down in his diary the
note: "ΕΥΡΗΚΑ! num = Δ + Δ' + Δ". On 1 October he published a result on the number
of solutions of polynomials with coefficients in finite fields, which 150 years
later led to the Weil conjectures.