Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss (; german: Gauß ; la, Carolus Fridericus Gauss; 30 April 177723 February 1855) was a German mathematician and physicist who made significant contributions to many fields in mathematics and science. Sometimes referred to as the ''Princeps mathematicorum'' () and "the greatest mathematician since antiquity", Gauss had an exceptional influence in many fields of mathematics and science, and he is ranked among history's most influential mathematicians. Also available at Retrieved 23 February 2014. Comprehensive biographical article.

Biography

Early years

Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss was born on 30 April 1777 in Brunswick (Braunschweig), in the

Duchy of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel A duchy, also called a dukedom, is a medieval country, territory, fief, or domain ruled by a duke or duchess, a ruler hierarchically second to the king or queen in Western European tradition. There once existed an important difference between " ...

(now part of Lower Saxony, Germany), to poor, working-class parents. 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. He was christened and confirmed in a church near the school he attended as a child. Gauss was a

child prodigy A child prodigy is defined in psychology research literature as a person under the age of ten who produces meaningful output in some domain at the level of an adult expert. The term is also applied more broadly to young people who are extraor ...

. In his memorial on Gauss, Wolfgang Sartorius von Waltershausen wrote that when Gauss was barely three years old he corrected a math error his father made; and that when he was seven, solved an arithmetic series problem faster than anyone else in his class of 100 pupils. There are many versions of this story, with various details regarding the nature of the series – the most frequent being the classical problem of adding together all the integers from 1 to 100. (S