Remembering The Prince Of Mathematics - Carl Friedrich Gauss
Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss (30 April 1777 – 23 February 1855) was a German mathematician and physicist who made significant contributions to many fields in mathematics and science. Sometimes referred to as the Prince of Mathematics and "the greatest mathematician since antiquity ", Gauss had an exceptional influence in many fields of mathematics and science, and is ranked among history's most influential mathematicians.
Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss was born on 30 April 1777 in, in the Duchy of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel (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 birth date 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.
Carl Friedrich Gauss
Gauss was a child prodigy. In his memorial on Gauss, Wolfgang Sartorius von Walters hausen says that when Gauss was barely three years old he corrected a math error his father made; and that when he was seven, he confidently solved an arithmetic series problem (commonly said to be 1 + 2 + 3 + ... + 98 + 99 + 100) faster than anyone else in his class of 100 students. Many versions of this story have been retold since that time with various details regarding what the series was – the most frequent being the classical problem of adding all the integers from 1 to 100. There are many other anecdotes about his precocity while a toddler and he made his first groundbreaking mathematical discoveries while still a teenager.
He completed his magnum opus, Disquisitions Arithmeticae, 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.
Gauss's intellectual abilities attracted the attention of the Duke of Brunswick, who sent him to the Collegium Carolinum (now Braunschweig University of Technology), which he attended from 1792 to 1795, and to the University of Göttingen from 1795 to 1798. While at university, Gauss independently rediscovered several important theorems. His breakthrough occurred in 1796 when he showed that a regular polygon can be constructed by compass and straightedge if the number of its sides is the product of distinct Fermat primes and a power of 2. 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. Gauss was so pleased with this result that he requested that a regular heptadecagon be inscribed on his tombstone. The stonemason declined, stating that the difficult construction would essentially look like a circle.
The year 1796 was productive for both Gauss and number theory. He discovered a construction of the heptadecagon on 30 March. He further advanced modular arithmetic, greatly simplifying manipulations in number theory. On 8 April he became the first to prove the quadratic reciprocity law. This remarkably general law allows mathematicians to determine the solvability of any quadratic equation in modular arithmetic. The prime number theorem, conjectured on 31 May, gives a good understanding of how the prime numbers are distributed among the integers.
Gauss also discovered that every positive integer is representable as a sum of at most three triangular numbers on 10 July and then jotted down in his diary the note: "ΕΥΡΗΚΑ! num = Δ + Δ' + Δ". On 1 October he published a result on the number of solutions of polynomials with coefficients in finite fields, which 150 years later led to the Weil conjectures.
Gauss remained mentally active into his old age, even while suffering from gout and general unhappiness. For example, at the age of 62, he taught himself Russian.
In 1840, Gauss published his influential Dioptrische Untersuchungen, in which he gave the first systematic analysis on the formation of images under a paraxial approximation (Gaussian optics). Among his results, Gauss showed that under a paraxial approximation an optical system can be characterized by its cardinal points and he derived the Gaussian lens formula. In 1845, he became an associated member of the Royal Institute of the Netherlands; when that became the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1851, he joined as a foreign member.
In 1854, Gauss selected the topic for Bernhard Riemann's inaugural lecture "Ãœber die Hypothesen, welche der Geometrie zu Grunde liegen" (About the hypotheses that underlie Geometry). On the way home from Riemann's lecture, Weber reported that Gauss was full of praise and excitement.
He was elected as a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1853.
Gauss on his deathbed (1855)
On 23 February 1855, Gauss died of a heart attack in Göttingen (then Kingdom of Hanover and now Lower Saxony); he is interred in the Albani Cemetery there. Two people gave eulogies at his funeral: Gauss's son-in-law Heinrich Ewald, and Wolfgang Sartorius von Waltershausen, who was Gauss's close friend and biographer. Gauss's brain was preserved and was studied by Rudolf Wagner, who found it’s mass to be slightly above average, at 1,492 grams, and the cerebral area equal to 219,588 square millimeters (340.362 square inches). Highly developed convolutions were also found, which in the early 20th century were suggested as the
Gauss was an ardent perfectionist and a hard worker. He was never a prolific writer, refusing to publish work which he did not consider complete and above criticism. This was in keeping with his personal motto pauca sed matura ("few, but ripe"). His personal diaries indicate that he had made several important mathematical discoveries years or decades before his contemporaries published them. Scottish-American mathematician and writer Eric Temple Bell said that if Gauss had published all of his discoveries in a timely manner, he would have advanced mathematics by fifty years.
Though he did take in a few students, Gauss was known to dislike teaching. It is said that he attended only a single scientific conference, which was in Berlin in 1828. However, several of his students became influential mathematicians, among them Richard Dedekind and Bernhard Riemann.
On Gauss's recommendation, Friedrich Bessel was awarded an honorary doctor degree from Göttingen in March 1811. Around that time, the two men engaged in a correspondence. However, when they met in person in 1825, they quarreled; the details are unknown. Before she died, Sophie Germain was recommended by Gauss to receive an honorary degree; she never received it.
Gauss usually declined to present the intuition behind his often very elegant proofs—he preferred them to appear "out of thin air" and erased all traces of how he discovered them. This is justified, if unsatisfactorily, by Gauss in his Disquisitiones Arithmeticae, where he states that all analysis (i.e., the paths one traveled to reach the solution of a problem) must be suppressed for sake of brevity. Gauss supported the monarchy and opposed Napoleon, whom he saw as an outgrowth of revolution. Gauss summarized his views on the pursuit of knowledge in a letter to Farkas Bolyai dated 2 September 1808 as follows:
“It is not knowledge, but the act of learning, not possession but the act of getting there, which grants the greatest enjoyment. When I have clarified and exhausted a subject, then I turn away from it, in order to go into darkness again. The never-satisfied man is so strange; if he has completed a structure, then it is not in order to dwell in it peacefully, but in order to begin another. I imagine the world conqueror must feel thus, who, after one kingdom is scarcely conquered, stretches out his arms for others.”
Source : Wikipedia
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