Johann carl friedrich gauss biography summary organizer

In , when he was only 24, Carl Gauss published the monumental work entitled Disquisitiones Arithmeticae , which laid the foundation for the systemized study of number theory as a distinct discipline. His famous discovery while studying at Gottingen was the topic of Section VII of his book in which he also introduced the symbol for congruence in geometry.

His doctoral dissertation represented a discussion on the first proof of the fundamental theorem of algebra, which states that every polynomial equation with complex coefficients has at least one complex root. Gauss also contributed to the discovery of the number of solutions for polynomial equations with coefficients in finite fields, which represented the basis for the Weil conjectures After Foucault had demonstrated the earth's rotation by his pendulum experiment in public in , Gerling questioned Gauss for further explanations.

This instigated Gauss to design a new apparatus for demonstration with a much shorter length of pendulum than Foucault's one. The oscillations were observed with a reading telescope, with a vertical scale and a mirror fastened at the pendulum. It is described in the Gauss—Gerling correspondence and Weber made some experiments with this apparatus in , but no data were published.

Gauss's principle of least constraint of was established as a general concept to overcome the division of mechanics into statics and dynamics, combining D'Alembert's principle with Lagrange 's principle of virtual work , and showing analogies to the method of least squares. In , Gauss was appointed to head of a Board for weights and measures of the Kingdom of Hanover.

He provided the creation of standards of length and measures. Gauss himself took care of the time-consuming measures and gave detailed orders for the mechanical preparation. This work got more than regional importance by the order of a law of that connected the Hanoverian measures with the English ones. Several stories of his early genius have been reported.

Carl Friedrich Gauss's mother had 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.

In his memorial on Gauss, Wolfgang Sartorius von Waltershausen tells a story about the three-year-old Gauss, who corrected a math error his father made. Out of about a hundred pupils, Gauss was the first to solve the problem correctly by a significant margin. The first membership of a scientific society was given to Gauss in by the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Both the University of Kazan and the Philosophy Faculty of the University of Prague appointed him honorary member in Gauss received the Lalande Prize from the French Academy of Science in for the theory of planets and the means of determining their orbits from only three observations, [ ] the Danish Academy of Science prize in for his memoir on conformal projection, [ ] and the Copley Medal from the Royal Society in for "his inventions and mathematical researches in magnetism".

Gauss was appointed Knight of the French Legion of Honour in , [ ] and was taken as one of the first members of the Prussian Order Pour le Merite Civil class when it was established in The Kings of Hanover appointed him the honorary titles " Hofrath " [ 51 ] and "Geheimer Hofrath" [ aa ] Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk.

Read Edit View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects. Wikimedia Commons Wikiquote Wikisource Wikidata item. This is the latest accepted revision , reviewed on 8 January German mathematician, astronomer, geodesist, and physicist — For other uses, see Gauss disambiguation. Johanna Osthoff. Minna Waldeck.

Lalande Prize Copley Medal Biography [ edit ]. Youth and education [ edit ]. Private scholar [ edit ]. Gauss's brain [ edit ]. Family [ edit ]. Heinrich Ewald Wilhelmina's husband. Personality [ edit ]. Scholar [ edit ]. Private man [ edit ]. Scientific work [ edit ]. Algebra and number theory [ edit ]. Fundamental theorem of algebra [ edit ].

Disquisitiones Arithmeticae [ edit ]. Main article: Disquisitiones Arithmeticae. Further investigations [ edit ]. Analysis [ edit ]. Numeric analysis [ edit ]. Chronology [ edit ]. Astronomy [ edit ]. Main article: Discovery of Ceres. Theory of errors [ edit ]. Arc measurement and geodetic survey [ edit ]. Differential geometry [ edit ].

Main article: Theorema Egregium. Non-Euclidean geometry [ edit ]. Main article: Non-Euclidean geometry. Early topology [ edit ]. Minor mathematical accomplishments [ edit ]. Magnetism and telegraphy [ edit ]. Geomagnetism [ edit ]. Electromagnetism [ edit ]. Potential theory [ edit ]. Optics [ edit ]. Mechanics [ edit ]. Metrology [ edit ]. Anecdotes [ edit ].

Honours and awards [ edit ]. Names and commemorations [ edit ]. Selected writings [ edit ]. Mathematics and astronomy [ edit ]. Physics [ edit ]. Together with Wilhelm Weber [ edit ]. Collected works [ edit ]. Correspondence [ edit ]. References [ edit ]. Notes [ edit ]. It was an actual letter of farewell, but it is uncertain whether it reached the addressee just in time.

Abel has [ Rotman , question whether it ever happened. It was soon translated and published in German and French. The complete text in Latin was published in Citations [ edit ]. Wittmann, Inna V. Oreshina Mitteilungen der Gauss-Gesellschaft 46 : 57— Berlin: Dudenverlag. ISBN Berlin: W alter de Gruyter. In Mittler, Elmar ed. The Scientific Monthly.

Bibcode : SciMo.. JSTOR Archived from the original on 26 February Also available at "The Sesquicentennial of the Birth of Gauss". Retrieved 23 February Comprehensive biographical article. Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada. ISSN X. In Beuermann, Klaus ed. Retrieved 10 March Thibaut, Bernhard Friedrich. Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie in German.

Mayer, Johann Tobias. Neue Deutsche Biographie in German. Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel. Leipzig: BSB B. Teubner Verlagsgesellschaft. The Mathematical Gazette. The Mathematical Association: — S2CID Vorstudien zu einer wissenschaftlichen Morphologie und Physiologie des menschlichen Gehirns als Seelenorgan, Vol. Gauss and C. PMID Max Planck Society.

New Series. American Association for the Advancement of Science: — Bibcode : Sci Allgemeine Vermessungs-Nachrichten in German 84 : — Genealogie in German. Oxford University Press. Geschichte der Mathematik in ihren Kontexten in German. Mathematische Annalen in Latin and German. Annals of Statistics. October ". Der komplette Briefwechsel von Carl Friedrich Gauss.

Retrieved 26 March He then concentrated on the study of mathematics, which he completed in with his doctoral thesis at the University of Helmstedt. Mathematics was represented by Johann Friedrich Pfaff, who became his doctoral advisor. And the Duke of Brunswick attached importance to the fact that Gauss should not receive his doctorate at a "foreign" university.

The son was given his first name after Giuseppe Piazzi, the discoverer of Ceres, a minor planet whose rediscovery in had made Gauss's orbital calculation possible. A month later, on October 11, , Johanna Gauss died in childbirth, Louis a few months later on March 1, Due to Johanna's death, Gauss fell into a depression for a while; from October comes a moving lament written by Gauss, which was found in his estate.

With her he had three children.

Johann carl friedrich gauss biography summary organizer

Eugen Gauss fell out with his father as a law student and emigrated to America in , where he lived as a merchant and founded the "First National Bank" of St. Wilhelm Gauss followed Eugen to the United States in and also became prosperous. His youngest daughter Therese Staufenau managed her father's household after her mother's death until his death.

Minna Gauss had died of tuberculosis after 13 years of suffering. After his doctorate, Gauss lived in Brunswick on the small salary paid to him by the Duke and worked on his Disquisitiones Arithmeticae. Gauss declined a call to the Petersburg Academy of Sciences out of gratitude to the Duke of Brunswick, probably also in the hope that the latter would build him an observatory in Brunswick.

There he had to give lectures, against which he developed an aversion. Practical astronomy was represented there by Karl Ludwig Harding, and the mathematical chair was held by Bernhard Friedrich Thibaut. Several of his students became influential mathematicians, including Richard Dedekind and Bernhard Riemann, as well as the mathematics historian Moritz Cantor.

At an advanced age, he became increasingly involved with literature and was an avid reader of newspapers. His favorite writers were Jean Paul and Walter Scott. He was fluent in English and French and, in addition to his familiarity with the classical languages of antiquity from his youth, read several modern European languages Spanish, Italian, Danish, Swedish , most recently learning Russian and tentatively studying Sanskrit, which, however, did not appeal to him.

In he was elected a corresponding and in a foreign member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, and in to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In he received the Copley Medal of the Royal Society. In the same year he turned down a call to the University of Vienna. His last scientific exchange was about an improvement of the Foucault pendulum in a letter to Alexander von Humboldt in He collected numerical and statistical data of all kinds and, for example, kept lists of the life expectancy of famous men calculated in days.

Thus, on December 7, , he wrote to his friend and chancellor of his order Alexander von Humboldt, among other things: "It is the day after tomorrow when you, my esteemed friend, will pass into a region into which none of the luminaries of the exact sciences has yet penetrated, the day when you will reach the same age at which Newton closed his earthly career measured by 30, days.

And Newton's forces were completely exhausted at this stage: you still stand in the full enjoyment of your admirable power to the highest joy of the whole scientific world. May you remain in this enjoyment for many years to come. Whether he played an instrument is not known. He was involved in stock speculation and at his death left a considerable fortune of , talers on a professor's basic salary of talers a year mainly in securities, including many from railroads.

This is one of the few passages in his correspondence in which he is critical of politics and the banks cooperating with it, because the Hesse-Darmstadt railroad shares he had purchased lost value drastically when it became known that the railroad could be nationalized at any time. He was still scientifically active towards the end of his life and in held.

In his last years, Gauss suffered from heart failure diagnosed as dropsy and insomnia. Gauss still participated in the inauguration of the railroad on July 31, , after which he was increasingly confined to his home by illness. Gauss distrusted the proofs of elementary geometry already at the age of twelve and suspected at the age of sixteen that there had to be a non-Euclidean geometry besides Euclidean geometry.

However, he did not publish his thoughts on non-Euclidean geometry, according to the reports of his confidants presumably for fear of the incomprehension of his contemporaries. He had not published anything about it, because he "shied away from the shouting of the Boeotians". Gauss found Lobachevsky's work so interesting that he learned the Russian language at an advanced age in order to study it.

At the age of 18, he discovered some properties of the prime number distribution and found the method of least squares, which involves minimizing the sum of squares of divergences. He refrained from publishing for the time being. According to this method, for example, the most probable result for a new measurement can be determined from a sufficiently large number of previous measurements.

On this basis, he later investigated theories for calculating the area under curves numerical integration , which led him to the Gaussian bell curve. The associated function is known as the density of the normal distribution and is applied in many probability calculation tasks, where it is the asymptotic, i. He made a thorough analysis over several years, concluding that pensions could be increased slightly.

In this way, Gauss also laid foundations in actuarial mathematics. In , at the age of 19, while considering the arc length on a lemniscate as a function of the distance of the curve point from the origin, he introduced what are historically called the first elliptic functions, the lemniscated sine functions. However, he never published his notes on them.

This work is related to his study of the arithmetic-geometric mean. There were seven sections, all but the last section, referred to above, being devoted to number theory. In June , Zach, an astronomer whom Gauss had come to know two or three years previously, published the orbital positions of Ceres, a new "small planet" which was discovered by G Piazzi , an Italian astronomer on 1 January, Unfortunately, Piazzi had only been able to observe 9 degrees of its orbit before it disappeared behind the Sun.

Zach published several predictions of its position, including one by Gauss which differed greatly from the others. When Ceres was rediscovered by Zach on 7 December it was almost exactly where Gauss had predicted. Although he did not disclose his methods at the time, Gauss had used his least squares approximation method. Gauss began corresponding with Bessel , whom he did not meet until , and with Sophie Germain.

Gauss married Johanna Ostoff on 9 October, Despite having a happy personal life for the first time, his benefactor, the Duke of Brunswick, was killed fighting for the Prussian army. In his father died, and a year later Gauss's wife Johanna died after giving birth to their second son, who was to die soon after her. Gauss was shattered and wrote to Olbers asking him to give him a home for a few weeks, to gather new strength in the arms of your friendship - strength for a life which is only valuable because it belongs to my three small children.

Gauss was married for a second time the next year, to Minna the best friend of Johanna, and although they had three children, this marriage seemed to be one of convenience for Gauss. Gauss's work never seemed to suffer from his personal tragedy. In the first volume he discussed differential equations , conic sections and elliptic orbits, while in the second volume, the main part of the work, he showed how to estimate and then to refine the estimation of a planet's orbit.

Gauss's contributions to theoretical astronomy stopped after , although he went on making observations until the age of Much of Gauss's time was spent on a new observatory, completed in , but he still found the time to work on other subjects. The latter work was inspired by geodesic problems and was principally concerned with potential theory.

In fact, Gauss found himself more and more interested in geodesy in the s. Gauss had been asked in to carry out a geodesic survey of the state of Hanover to link up with the existing Danish grid. Gauss was pleased to accept and took personal charge of the survey, making measurements during the day and reducing them at night, using his extraordinary mental capacity for calculations.

He regularly wrote to Schumacher, Olbers and Bessel , reporting on his progress and discussing problems. Because of the survey, Gauss invented the heliotrope which worked by reflecting the Sun's rays using a design of mirrors and a small telescope. However, inaccurate base lines were used for the survey and an unsatisfactory network of triangles.

Gauss often wondered if he would have been better advised to have pursued some other occupation but he published over 70 papers between and From the early s Gauss had an interest in the question of the possible existence of a non-Euclidean geometry. He discussed this topic at length with Farkas Bolyai and in his correspondence with Gerling and Schumacher.

In a book review in he discussed proofs which deduced the axiom of parallels from the other Euclidean axioms, suggesting that he believed in the existence of non-Euclidean geometry, although he was rather vague.