Scientist of the day - Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss

Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss was a German mathematician and astronomer who is ranked as one of history's most influential mathematicians. Often referred to as the Princeps mathematicorum ("the Prince of Mathematicians") and "greatest mathematician since antiquity", he made significant contributions to several fields including number theory, algebra, statistics, analysis, geometry, astronomy, and matrix theory. Born to poor working-class parents in Brunswick, he started displaying evidence of his genius while he was just a young child. A child prodigy, he is said to have corrected an error in his father’s payroll calculations as a small boy of three. He began to astonish his teachers with his brilliance at school and made his first ground-breaking mathematical discovery while he was still a teenager. Even though his parents were poor, he found a patron in the Duke of Brunswick who recognized his intelligence and sent him to the prestigious University of Göttingen. Eventually he established himself as a prominent mathematician in Germany and his reputation soon spread internationally. He made notable contributions to almost all fields in mathematics, but his favorite area was number theory, a field which he revolutionized with his work on complex numbers. He also published many books including ‘Disquisitiones Arithmeticae’ which is regarded as one of the most influential mathematics books ever written. 

Major Works

• His textbook on number theory, ‘Disquisitiones Arithmeticae’, discussed important results in number theory obtained by prominent mathematicians such as Fermat, Euler, Lagrange and Legendre, along with Gauss’s own important new results. Considered highly influential at the time of its first publication, the book remained influential up until the 20th century.
• Carl Gauss formulated the Gauss’s law which related the distribution of electric charge to the resulting electric field. The law can be used to derive Coulomb's law, and vice versa.
• He invented the heliotrope, an instrument that uses a mirror to reflect sunlight over great distances with the purpose of marking positions in a land survey. Heliotropes were used in surveys in Germany up to the late 1980s, when GPS measurements replaced the use of the heliotrope in long distance surveys.

  Awards & Achievements

  • In 1810, he was honored with the Lalande Prize by the French Academy of Sciences in recognition of his contributions to astronomy.
  • He was awarded the prize of the Danish Academy of Sciences in 1823 for his study of angle-preserving maps.
  • He was presented with the Copley Medal by the Royal Society, London, in 1838 "for his inventions and mathematical researches in magnetism”.