Carl Friedrich Gauss

Carl Friedrich Gauss was born in Brunswick in 1777 to a bricklayer father and an illiterate mother. He corrected his father's payroll arithmetic at the age of three and, according to the classroom legend, summed the integers from one to a hundred in seconds while his schoolmaster expected an hour of silence. The Duke of Brunswick paid for his education; by twenty-one Gauss had completed the Disquisitiones Arithmeticae, a book so dense and original that no mathematician in Europe could read it quickly.

For the next sixty years he was the dominant mathematician of the age and, increasingly, a working astronomer. In 1801 he reconstructed the orbit of the dwarf planet Ceres from a handful of measurements using the method of least squares, and the result made him the obvious choice to direct the new observatory at Göttingen when it opened in 1807. He held that post until his death in 1855 — forty-eight years in the same office, turning out the Gaussian distribution, non-Euclidean geometry, conformal mapping, the fundamental theorem of algebra, and the first modern survey of the Kingdom of Hanover. His motto was pauca sed matura ("few, but ripe"), and half of what we now call nineteenth-century mathematics sat in his private notebooks, unpublished, until his death.

The electromagnetic chapter came late. In the 1830s he collaborated with the physicist Wilhelm Weber on absolute units of magnetism, built Germany's first electric telegraph between the observatory and Weber's lab, and wrote the elegant flux-divergence theorem — what physicists now call Gauss's law — as part of a broader programme on potential theory. The SI unit of magnetic flux density bore his name until 1960, when it was replaced by the tesla; the non-SI unit (1 gauss = 10⁻⁴ T) survives in geophysics and astronomy. In his later years he became increasingly reclusive, refusing to publish speculative results, and the full catalogue of his discoveries was not known until his correspondence was edited decades after his death. Einstein called him the equal of Archimedes and Newton.