Carl Friedrich Gauss

German mathematician and physicist (1777–1855)

Fame83.4
Momentum0.0
Germany rank#18

Source-basedFalling

Fame83.4
Momentum0.0
Germany rank#18
Academics rank#31
Wikipedia87.7K

Lived 1777–1855, aged 78Germany

Germany AcademicsAcademic

Wikipedia
163 languages
Cross-language footprint
Rank in Germany
#18
Academics
Era
1777–1855
Aged 78
Awards
6
recognised works

Summary

Updated 2026-08-14

A working-class German kid who at nineteen cracked a geometry problem untouched for two millennia, then spent the rest of his life seeding ideas — non-Euclidean space, least squares, the fast Fourier transform — that wouldn't be named or widely known until decades, sometimes a century, after he'd quietly worked them out.

Biography

About

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 th…

Voice

In their own words

Sourced, dated quotes from Carl Friedrich Gauss

Carl Friedrich Gauss

said1832

To praise it would amount to praising myself.

— Letter to Farkas Bolyai, on his son János Bolyai's 1832 publishings on non-Euclidean geometry.

Carl Friedrich Gauss

said1832

I will add that I have recently received from Hungary a little paper on non-Euclidean geometry in which I rediscover all my own ideas and results worked out with great elegance...

— Letter to Gerling (1832)

Carl Friedrich Gauss

said1832

The history of the apple is too absurd. Whether the apple fell or not, how can any one believe that such a discovery could in that way be accelerated or retarded?

— As quoted by Robert Chambers, "Sir Isaac Newton and the Apple," The Book of Days (1832) Vol. 2, p. 757.

Carl Friedrich Gauss

said1827