Johann carl friedrich gauss biography mathematics
•
Carl Friedrich Gauss
For an extensive survey of terrestrial magnetism, he invented an early type of magnetometer, a device that measures the direction and strength of a magnetic field. Gauss also developed a consistent struktur of magnetic units, and with Wilhelm Weber built one of the first electromagnetic telegraphs. Gauss’ laws describing magnetic and electric fluxes served as part of the foundation on which James Clerk Maxwell developed his famous equations and electromagnetic theory.
Johann Friedrich Carl Gauss was born in 1777 to a poor family in Brunswick, Germany. The boy was found to be a mathematical prodigy. Gauss’ fantastisk calculating abilities aroused the interest of his teachers, and the child received a solid education despite lack of money. His teachers gave him advanced textbooks and introduced him to the work of prominent mathematicians of the day. Gauss’ skills in that field as well as his facility for languages eventually gained him the patronage of the Duke of B
•
American Scientist
Let me tell you a story, although it's such a well-worn nugget of mathematical lore that you've probably heard it already:
In the 1780s a provincial German schoolmaster gave his class the tedious assignment of summing the first 100 integers. The teacher's aim was to keep the kids quiet for half an hour, but one young pupil almost immediately produced an answer: 1 + 2 + 3 + ... + 98 + 99 + 100 = 5,050. The smart aleck was Carl Friedrich Gauss, who would go on to join the short list of candidates for greatest mathematician ever. Gauss was not a calculating prodigy who added up all those numbers in his head. He had a deeper insight: If you "fold" the series of numbers in the middle and add them in pairs—1 + 100, 2 + 99, 3 + 98, and so on—all the pairs sum to 101. There are 50 such pairs, and so the grand total is simply 50×101. The more general formula, for a list of consecutive numbers from 1 through n, is n(n + 1)/2.
The paragraph above is my own rendi
•
One of the reasons why Gauss was able to contribute so much math over his lifetime was that he got a very early start. There are many tales of his childhood precociousness. The most famous anecdote of young Gauss is the time he found the shortcut for calculating the sum of an arithmetic progression at the tender age of 10.
The anecdote involves his schoolteacher who wanted to take a rest and asked the students to sum the integers from 1 to 100 as busy work. After a few seconds, the teacher saw Gauss sitting idle. When asked why he was not frantically doing addition, Gauss quickly replied that the sum was 5050. His classmates and teacher were astonished, and Gauss ended up being the only pupil to calculate the correct answer.
The story may be apocryphal, and is told different ways in different sources. Nobody is sure which method of summing an arithmetic sequence Gauss figured out as a child. Though there are several ways young Gauss might have solved it, one of them has a concise,