01/05/2013
Today we commemorate the birthday of one of the greatest mathematicians of all time who is also referred to as referred to as the Princeps mathematicorum (the Prince of Mathematicians). He is none other than Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss.
Gauss was a child prodigy, he made his first ground-breaking mathematical discoveries while still a teenager. He completed Disquisitiones Arithmeticae, his magnum opus, in 1798 at the age of 21, though it was not published until 1801. This work was fundamental in consolidating number theory as a discipline and has shaped the field to the present day. While at university, Gauss independently rediscovered several important theorems; his breakthrough occurred in 1796 when he showed that any regular polygon with a number of sides which is a Fermat prime (and, consequently, those polygons with any number of sides which is the product of distinct Fermat primes and a power of 2) can be constructed by compass and straightedge. 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.
There are several stories of his early genius. According to one, in primary school after the young Gauss misbehaved, his teacher, J.G. Büttner, gave him a task : add a list of integers in arithmetic progression; as the story is most often told, these were the numbers from 1 to 100. The young Gauss reputedly produced the correct answer within seconds, to the astonishment of his teacher and his assistant Martin Bartels.
Gauss's presumed method was to realize that pairwise addition of terms from opposite ends of the list yielded identical intermediate sums: 1 + 100 = 101, 2 + 99 = 101, 3 + 98 = 101, and so on, for a total sum of 50 × 101 = 5050.
To know more about him and his works please go through the following URLs:
Biographies - http://bit.ly/156oBbN, http://bit.ly/ZZt0VY, http://bit.ly/12NJUKB, http://bit.ly/16gQyNg.
His complete works (In German) - http://bit.ly/13IhUId.
Report of the Council to the Thirty-sixth Annual General Meeting of the Society - http://bit.ly/alNNKD.
"Carl Friedrich Gauss" in the series A Brief History of Mathematics on BBC 4 - http://bbc.in/cY9BC7.
A fascinating lecture by Prof. Raymond Flood, Gresham College, England, on Carl Friedrich Gauss - http://bit.ly/12gdN3u.
Oh this eve we wish the prince of mathematics many many happy returns of the day. :)
