Carl Friedrich Gauss

Born in 1777, Gauss showed such early facility with numbers that he landed at the University of Göttingen, where he proved the constructibility of the heptadecagon at nineteen - the first advance in regular polygon construction in over two thousand years. He published Disquisitiones Arithmeticae and Theoria motus corporum coelestium, introduced the triple bar for congruence, gave the second and third complete proofs of the fundamental theorem of algebra, and contributed the law of quadratic reciprocity and Gaussian curvature's Theorema Egregium. From 1807 until his death in 1855 he directed the Göttingen Observatory, tracking Ceres, leading the geodetic survey of Hanover, formulating principles of magnetism, providing the first absolute measurement of Earth's magnetic field in 1832, and inventing the heliotrope and - with Wilhelm Eduard Weber - the first electromagnetic telegraph. He refused to publish incomplete work, so many discoveries surfaced only after his death; more than a hundred concepts now carry his name.