Carl Friedrich Gauss

ⓘ;[2][3]
Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss (German: Gauß [kaʁl ˈfʁiːdʁɪç ˈɡaʊs] Latin: Carolus Fridericus
Gauss; 30 April 1777 – 23 February 1855) was a German mathematician, geodesist, and physicist who
made significant contributions to many fields in mathematics and science. Gauss ranks among
history's most influential mathematicians.[4] He has been referred to as the "Prince of
Mathematicians".[5][6]

Gauss was a child prodigy in mathematics. While still a student at the University of Göttingen, he
propounded several mathematical theorems. Gauss completed his masterpieces Disquisitiones
Arithmeticae and Theoria motus corporum coelestium as a private scholar. Later he was director of
the Göttingen Observatory and professor at the university for nearly half a century, from 1807 until
his death in 1855.

Gauss published the second and third complete proofs of the fundamental theorem of algebra,
made contributions to number theory and developed the theories of binary and ternary quadratic
forms. He is credited with inventing the fast Fourier transform algorithm and was instrumental in the
discovery of the dwarf planet Ceres.[7] His work on the motion of planetoids disturbed by large
planets led to the introduction of the Gaussian gravitational constant and the method of least
squares, which he discovered before Adrien-Marie Legendre published on the method,[8][9][10][11]
and which is still used in all sciences to minimize measurement error. He also anticipated non-
Euclidean geometry, and was the first to analyze it, even coining the term.[12][13][14] He is considered
one of its discoverers alongside Nikolai Lobachevsky and János Bolyai.[15]

Gauss invented the heliotrope in 1821,[16] a magnetometer in 1833 and, alongside Wilhelm Eduard
Weber, invented the first electromagnetic telegraph in 1833.[17]

Gauss was a careful author. He refused to publish incomplete work. Although he published
extensively during his life, he left behind several works to be published posthumously.

Although Gauss was known to dislike teaching, some of his students became influential
mathematicians. He believed that the act of learning, not possession of knowledge, provided the
greatest enjoyment.
Biography Carl Friedrich Gauss

Youth and education

Portrait by Christian Albrecht Jensen, 1840

(copy from Gottlieb Biermann, 1887)[1]
House of birth in Brunswick
(destroyed in World War II) Born Johann Carl Friedrich
Gauss
30 April 1777
Brunswick,
Principality of
Brunswick-
Wolfenbüttel,
Holy Roman Empire

Caricature of Abraham Gotthelf Died 23 February 1855

Kästner by Gauss (1795)
(aged 77)
Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss was born on 30 April Göttingen, Kingdom
1777 in Brunswick (Braunschweig), in the Duchy of of Hanover,
Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel (now part of Lower German
Confederation
Saxony, Germany), to a family of lower social
status.[18] His father Gebhard Dietrich Gauss Alma mater Collegium Carolinum
(1744–1808) worked in several jobs, as butcher, University of
bricklayer, gardener, and as treasurer of a death- Göttingen
benefit fund. Gauss characterized his father as an University of

honourable and respected man, but rough and Helmstedt (PhD)

dominating at home. He was experienced in Known for Full list

writing and calculating, but his wife Dorothea
(1743–1839), Carl Friedrich's mother, was nearly Spouses Johanna Osthoff
illiterate. Carl Friedrich was christened and (m. 1805; died 1809)​
confirmed in a church[a] near the school that he Minna Waldeck
(m. 1810; died 1831)​
attended as a child.[19] He had one elder brother
from his father's first marriage. Children 6

Gauss was a child prodigy in the field of Awards Lalande Prize (1809)
mathematics. When the elementary teachers Copley Medal (1838)
noticed his intellectual abilities, they brought him
Scientific career
to the attention of the Duke of Brunswick, who
sent him to the local Collegium Carolinum,[b] Fields Mathematics and

which he attended from 1792 to 1795 with sciences

Eberhard August Wilhelm von Zimmermann as Institutions University of

one of his teachers. Thereafter the Duke granted Göttingen
him the resources for studies of mathematics,
Thesis Demonstratio nova...
sciences, and classical languages at the
(http://www.e-rara.c
Hanoverian University of Göttingen until 1798.[4]
h/zut/content/titleinf
It is not known why Gauss went to Göttingen and
o/1336299) (1799)
not to the University of Helmstedt near his native
Brunswick, but it is assumed that the large library Doctoral advisor Johann Friedrich Pfaff

of Göttingen, where students were allowed to Doctoral students Richard Dedekind

borrow books and take them home, was the Christian Ludwig
[20]
decisive reason. One of his professors in Gerling
mathematics was Abraham Gotthelf Kästner, Wilhelm
whom Gauss called "the leading mathematician Klinkerfues

among poets, and the leading poet among Johann Benedict

Listing
mathematicians" because of his epigrams.[21]
Bernhard Riemann
Gauss depicted him in a drawing showing a
August Ritter
lecture scene where he produced errors in a
Karl von Staudt
simple calculation. Astronomy was taught by Karl
Felix von Seyffer (1762–1822), with whom Gauss Other notable Gotthold Eisenstein

stayed in correspondence after graduation; Olbers students Johann Franz Encke

Carl Wolfgang
and Gauss mocked him in their correspondence.
Benjamin
On the other hand, he thought highly of Georg
Goldschmidt
Christoph Lichtenberg, his teacher of physics, and
Adolph Theodor
of Christian Gottlob Heyne, whose lectures in Kupffer
classics Gauss attended with pleasure.[22] Fellow August Ferdinand
students of this time were Johann Friedrich Möbius
Benzenberg, Farkas Bolyai, and Heinrich Wilhelm Moritz Stern
Brandes. Georg Frederik
Ursin
Though being a registered student at university, it Moritz Ludwig
is evident that he was a self-taught student in Wichmann

mathematics, since he independently

Signature
rediscovered several theorems.[23] He succeeded
with a breakthrough in a geometrical problem
that had occupied mathematicians since the days
of the Ancient Greeks when he determined in
1796 which regular polygons can be constructed
by compass and straightedge. This discovery was
the subject of his first publication and ultimately
led Gauss to choose mathematics instead of philology as a career.[24] Gauss' mathematical diary
shows that, in the same year, he was also productive in number theory. He made advanced
discoveries in modular arithmetic, found the first proof of the quadratic reciprocity law, and dealt
with the prime number theorem. Many ideas for his mathematical magnum opus Disquisitiones
arithmeticae, published in 1801, date from this time.

Private scholar

Gauss graduated as a Doctor of Philosophy in 1799. He did not graduate from Göttingen, as is
sometimes stated,[c][25] but rather, at the Duke of Brunswick's special request, from the University of
Helmstedt, the only state university of the duchy. There, Johann Friedrich Pfaff assessed his doctoral
thesis, and Gauss got the degree in absentia without the further oral examination that was usually
requested. The Duke then granted him his cost of living as a private scholar in Brunswick. Gauss
showed his gratitude and loyalty for this bequest when he refused several calls from the Russian
Academy of Sciences in St. Peterburg and from Landshut University. Later, the Duke promised him
the foundation of an observatory in Brunswick in 1804. Architect Peter Joseph Krahe made
preliminary designs, but one of Napoleon's wars cancelled those plans:[26] the Duke was mortally
wounded in the battle of Jena in 1806. The duchy was abolished in the following year, and Gauss's
financial support stopped. He then followed a call to the University of Göttingen, an institution of
the newly founded Kingdom of Westphalia under Jérôme Bonaparte, as full professor and director of
the astronomical observatory.

Studying the calculation of asteroid orbits, Gauss established contact with the astronomical
community of Bremen and Lilienthal, especially Wilhelm Olbers, Karl Ludwig Harding and Friedrich
Wilhelm Bessel, an informal group of astronomers known as the Celestial police.[27] One of their
aims was the discovery of further planets, and they assembled data on asteroids and comets as a
basis for Gauss's research. Gauss was thereby able to develop new, powerful methods for the
determination of orbits, which he later published in his astronomical magnum opus Theoria motus
corporum coelestium (1809).

Professor in Göttingen

Old Göttingen observatory, circa 1800

Gauss on his deathbed (1855)

Gauss arrived at Göttingen in November 1807, and in the following years he was confronted with
the demand for two thousand francs from the Westphalian government as a war contribution.
Without having yet received his salary, he could not raise this enormous amount. Both Olbers and
Laplace wanted to help him with the payment, but Gauss refused their assistance. Finally, an
anonymous person from Frankfurt, later discovered to be Prince-primate Dalberg,[28] paid the sum.

Gauss took on the directorate of the 60-year-old observatory, founded in 1748 by Prince-elector
George II and built on a converted fortification tower,[29] with usable, but partly out-of-date
instruments.[30] The construction of a new observatory had been approved by Prince-elector George
III in principle since 1802, and the Westphalian government continued the planning,[31] but the
building was not finished until October 1816. It contained new up-to-date instruments, for instance
two meridian circles from Repsold[32] and Reichenbach,[33] and a heliometer from Fraunhofer.[34]

The scientific activity of Gauss, besides pure mathematics, can be roughly divided into three periods:
in the first two decades of the 19th century astronomy was the main focus, in the third decade
geodesy, and in the fourth decade he occupied himself with physics, mainly magnetism.[35]

Gauss remained mentally active into his old age, even while suffering from gout and general
unhappiness. His last observation was the solar eclipse of July 28, 1851.[36] On 23 February 1855,
Gauss died of a heart attack in Göttingen;[21] he is interred in the Albani Cemetery there. Heinrich
Ewald, Gauss's son-in-law, and Wolfgang Sartorius von Waltershausen, Gauss's close friend and
biographer, gave eulogies at his funeral.

Gauss's brain

The day after Gauss's death his brain was removed, preserved and studied by Rudolf Wagner, who
found its mass to be slightly above average, at 1,492 grams (52.6 oz).[37][38] The cerebral area was
determined by Wagner's son Hermann in his doctoral thesis to be 219,588 square millimetres
(340.362 sq in).[39] Highly developed convolutions were also found, which in the early 20th century
were suggested as the explanation for his genius.[40] After various previous investigations, a
magnetic resonance study of 1998, done at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in
Göttingen, gave no results which could be used to explain his mathematical abilities.[41]

In 2013, a neurobiologist at the same institute discovered that Gauss's brain had been mixed up,
due to mislabelling, with that of the physician Conrad Heinrich Fuchs, who died in Göttingen a few
months after Gauss.[42] A further investigation showed no remarkable anomalies in the brains of
either person. Thus, all investigations on Gauss's brain until 1998, except the first ones of Rudolf and
Hermann Wagner, actually refer to the brain of Fuchs.[43]

Family

Therese Gauss (1834) by

Ludwig Becker
Gauss married Johanna Osthoff (1780–1809) on 9 October 1805.[44] They had two sons and a
daughter: Joseph (1806–1873), Wilhelmina (1808–1840) and Louis (1809–1810). Johanna died on 11
October 1809 one month after the birth of Louis, who himself died a few months later.

Gauss remarried within a year, on 4 August 1810, to Wilhelmine (Minna) Waldeck (1788–1831), a
friend of his first wife. They had three more children: Eugen (later Eugene) (1811–1896), Wilhelm
(later William) (1813–1879) and Therese (1816–1864). Minna Gauss died on 12 September 1831 after
being seriously ill for more than a decade.[45] Therese then took over the household and cared for
Gauss for the rest of his life; after her father's death she married the actor Constantin Staufenau.[46]
Her sister Wilhelmina married the orientalist Heinrich Ewald.[47] Gauss' mother Dorothea lived in his
house from 1817 until her death in 1839.[4]

The eldest son Joseph, whilst still a schoolboy, helped his father as an assistant during his survey
campaign in summer 1821. After a short time at university, in 1824 Joseph joined the Hanoverian
army and assisted in surveying again in 1829. In the 1830s he was responsible for the enlargement
of the survey network to the western parts of the kingdom. With his geodetical qualifications he left
the service and engaged in the construction of the railway network as director of the Royal
Hanoverian State Railways. In 1836 he studied the railroad system in the US for some months.[48][d]

Eugen left Göttingen in September 1830 and emigrated to the United States, where he joined the
army for five years. He then worked for the American Fur Company in the Midwest, where he
learned the Sioux language. Later, he moved to Missouri and became a successful businessman.[48]
Wilhelm married a niece of the astronomer Friedrich Bessel and also moved to Missouri in 1837,[51]
starting as a farmer and later becoming wealthy in the shoe business in St. Louis.[52] Eugene and
William have numerous descendants in America, but the descendants left in Germany all derive from
Joseph, as the Gauss daughters had no children.[48]

Personality

The scholar

Gauss' seal
At the end of the 18th century, German academic mathematics was in a poor condition: the prolific
mathematicians of that time worked in France and other European countries.[e] The mathematical
mainstream was orientated at solving practical problems in mechanics, astronomy, geodesy, etc.[54]
In this scientific environment, Gauss can be seen, following Felix Klein, as typical of both 18th and
19th-century mathematicians. His interest in practical applicability, for example in geodesy and
astronomy, qualified Gauss to be taken as a typical applied mathematician of the century of
enlightenment. On the other hand, he began research in numerous parts of mathematics without
defined links to practical purposes, and thus showed himself as a pioneer of what was later called
"pure mathematics". In contrast to earlier mathematicians, such as Leonhard Euler—who let their
readers take part in their reasoning as they developed new ideas, and included certain erroneous
deviations from the correct path—Gauss developed a new style of direct and complete explanation
that did not attempt to show the reader the author's train of thought.[55][56]

"Gauss was the first to restore that rigor of demonstration which we admire in the ancients and
which had been forced unduly into the background by the exclusive interest of preceding period
in new developments."[57]

But for himself, he propagated a quite different ideal, given in a letter to Farkas Bolyai on 2
September 1808 as follows:[58]

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.

— Dunnington 2004, p. 416

Gauss refused to publish work which he did not consider complete and above criticism. This
perfectionism was in keeping with the motto of his personal seal Pauca sed Matura ("Few, but Ripe").
His personal diary indicates that he had made several mathematical discoveries years or decades
before contemporaries published them. He put down new ideas in writing to his colleagues, who
encouraged him to publish, and sometimes rebuked him if he hesitated too long, in their opinion.
Gauss defended himself, claiming that the initial discovery of ideas was easy, but preparing a
publishable elaboration was a demanding matter for him, for either lack of time or "serenity of
mind".[59] Nevertheless, he published many short communications of urgent content in various
journals, but his "Collected Works" contain a considerable literary estate, too.[60][61] 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.[6]
On certain occasions, Gauss claimed that a finding published by another scholar had already been in
his possession previously. Thus his concept of priority as "the first to discover, not the first to
publish" differed from that of his scientific contemporaries.[62] In contrast to his perfectionism in
presenting mathematical ideas, he was criticized for his negligent way of quoting. He justified
himself with a very special view of correct quoting: if he gave references, then only in a quite
complete way, with respect to the previous authors of importance, which no one should ignore; but
quoting in this way needed knowledge of the history of science and more time than he wished to
spend.[59]

A sketch of Gauss by his

friend Johann Benedict
Listing, 1830

Though Gauss is seen as a master of axiomatic presentation, it became obvious from his
posthumously published papers, his diary, and short glosses in his own textbooks, that he worked to
a great extent in an empirical way. Gauss was a lifelong busy and enthusiastic calculator. He coped
with the enormous workload by using skillful tools.[63] Gauss used a lot of mathematical tables,
examined their qualities, and constructed new tables on various matters for personal use.[64] He
developed new tools for effective calculation, for example the Gaussian elimination. It has been
taken as a curious feature of his working style that he carried out calculations with a high degree of
precision, much more than required.[65] Very likely, this method gave him a lot of material which he
used in finding theorems in number theory.[63]

It was well known to his close colleagues that Gauss disliked giving academic lectures. He first stated
this to Olbers in 1802, so this aversion was not the result of bad experience. Thus he refused to
accept any academic position with teaching duties during his years as a private scholar. But from the
start of his academic career at Göttingen in 1807, he continuously gave lectures until 1854.[66] He
often complained about the efforts of teaching, feeling that it was a waste of his time, but on the
other hand he occasionally described one or other student as talented. In all these 47 years of
teaching he gave only three lectures on subjects of pure mathematics, whereas most of his lectures
dealt with astronomy, geodesy, and applied mathematics. However, many of Gauss' students went
on to become renowned mathematicians, physicists, and astronomers: Moritz Cantor, Dedekind,
Dirksen, Encke, Gould[f], Heine, Klinkerfues, Kupffer, Listing, Möbius, Nicolai, Riemann, Ritter,
Schering, Scherk, Schumacher, Seeber, von Staudt, Stern, Ursin; as geoscientists Sartorius von
Waltershausen and Wappäus.[68]

Gauss wrote no textbooks, and (unlike his friends Bessel, Humboldt, and Olbers) he disliked the
popularization of scientific matters. His only attempts at popularization were his works on the date
of Easter[69] and the essay Erdmagnetismus und Magnetometer of 1836.[59]

Gauss published his papers and books exclusively in Latin or in German.[g]

The new Göttingen Observatory of

1816; Gauss' living rooms were in the
western wing (right)

At Göttingen University, Gauss was accompanied by a staff of other lecturers in his disciplines, who
completed the educational program: for instance the brilliant Thibaut in mathematics, in physics
Weber and Mayer, well known for his successful textbooks, and Harding, who took the main part of
lectures in astronomy. When the observatory was completed, Gauss took his living accommodation
in the western wing of the new observatory and Harding in the eastern one. Once they had been on
friendly terms with another, but in the course of time they became alienated, possibly – as some
biographers presume – because Gauss had wished the equal-ranked Harding to be no more than his
assistant or observer.[h] The years since 1820 were evaluated as a "period of lower astronomical
activity".[71] The new, well-equipped observatory did not work as effectively as others; Gauss'
astronomical research had the character of a one-man enterprise, and the university established a
place for an assistant only after Harding's death in 1834. But nevertheless Gauss twice refused the
opportunity to solve the problem by accepting offers from Berlin in 1810 and 1825 to become a full
member of the Prussian Academy, without no great lecturing duties, as well as from Leipzig
University in 1810 and from Vienna University in 1842. Perhaps the reason was the difficult situation
of his family.[72] In his later years, Gauss was one of the best-paid professors of the university.[48]
When Gauss was asked for help by his friend Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel in 1810, who was in trouble at
Königsberg University because of his lack of an academic title,[i] Gauss provided a doctorate honoris
causa for Bessel from the Philosophy Faculty of Göttingen in March 1811. Gauss gave another
recommendation for an honorary degree for Sophie Germain, but only shortly before her death, so
she never received it.[73] He also gave successful support for the talented mathematician Gotthold
Eisenstein in Berlin.

After King William IV's death in 1837, the personal union between the kingdoms of Great Britain and
Ireland and Hanover ceased. In the same year, the new Hanoverian king Ernest Augustus annulled
the constitution given to the state by his brother in 1833. Seven prominent professors, later known
as the "Göttingen Seven", protested against this, among them Gauss' friend and collaborator
Wilhelm Weber and Gauss' son-in-law Heinrich Ewald. All of them were dismissed, three of them
were expelled, but Ewald and Weber could stay in Göttingen. Ewald took a position the University of
Tübingen in 1838, where Gauss' daughter Wilhelmina died soon afterwards in 1840, and with Weber
went to Leipzig in 1843; but both of them returned to their Göttingen positions in 1849 as the only
ones of the Göttingen Seven. Gauss was deeply affected by this quarrel, but saw no possibility to
help them.[74]

Gauss took part in academic administration: three times he was elected as dean of the Philosophy
Faculty.[75] Being entrusted with the widow's pension fund of the university, he dealt with actuarial
science and wrote a report on the strategy for stabilizing the benefits. He was appointed director of
the Royal Academy of Sciences in Göttingen for nine years, even in his last year of life.[75]

The private man

Gauss' second wife

Wilhelmine Waldeck

Soon after Gauss' death, his friend Sartorius published the first biography (1856), written in a rather
enthusiastic style. Sartorius saw Gauss as a serene and forward-striving man with childlike
modesty,[76] but also of "iron character"[77] with an unshakeable strength of mind.[78] He was noted
for a sense of justice[79] and religious tolerance.[80] Apart from his closer circle, others regarded him
as reserved and unapproachable, "like an Olympian sitting enthroned on the summit of science".[81]
His close contemporaries agreed that Gauss was a man of difficult character. He often refused to
accept compliments. His visitors were occasionally irritated by grumpy behaviour, but a short time
later his mood could change, and he became a charming, open-minded host.[59]

Gauss' life was overshadowed by severe problems in his family. When his first wife Johanna suddenly
died shortly after the death of their third child, he plunged into a depression from which he never
fully recovered. Soon after her death he wrote a last letter to her in the style of an ancient threnody,
the most personal surviving document of Gauss'.[82][83] The situation worsened when tuberculosis
afflicted, and ultimately destroyed the health of, his second wife Minna over 13 years; both his
daughters later suffered from the same disease.[84] Both younger sons were educated for some years
in Celle far from Göttingen. Gauss himself gave only slight hints of his personal distress: in a letter to
Bessel dated December 1831 he described himself as "the victim of the worst domestic
sufferings".[59]

Gauss grew to dominate his children and eventually had conflicts with his sons, because he did not
want any of them to enter mathematics or science for "fear of lowering the family name", as he
believed none of them would surpass his own achievements. The military career of his elder son
Joseph ended after more than two decades with the rank of a poorly paid first lieutenant, although
he had acquired a considerable knowledge of geodesy. He needed financial support from his father
even after he was married.[48] The second son Eugen shared a good measure of Gauss' talent in
computation and languages, but had a vivacious and sometimes rebellious character. He wanted to
study philology, whereas Gauss wanted him to become a lawyer. Having run up debts and caused a
scandal in public,[85] he suddenly left Göttingen under dramatic circumstances in September 1830
and emigrated via Bremen to the United States. He wasted the little money he had taken for
starting, after which his father refused further financial support. The youngest son Wilhelm wanted
to qualify for agricultural administration, but had difficulties to get an appropriate education, and
emigrated as well. Only Gauss' youngest daughter Therese accompanied him in his last years of life.

Collecting numerical data on very different things, useful or useless, became a habit in his later
years, for example the number of paths from his home to certain places in Göttingen, or the
numbers of living days of persons; he congratulated Humboldt in December 1851, when he had
reached the same age as Isaac Newton at his death, calculated in days.[86]

Gauss had a good knowledge of Latin as well as of modern languages. At the age of 62, he began to
teach himself Russian, very likely to understand scientific writings from Russia, among them those of
Lobachevsky on non-Euclidean geometry.[87] Gauss read both classical and modern literature, the
English and French in the original languages.[j] His favorite English author was Walter Scott, his
favorite German Jean Paul.[89] Gauss liked singing and went to concerts.[90] He was a busy
newspaper reader, and in his last years he used to visit an academic press salon of the university
every noon.[91] Gauss did not care much for philosophy, and mocked the "splitting hairs of the so-
called metaphysicians", by which he meant proponents of the contemporary school of
Naturphilosophie.[92]

Gauss' religious beliefs have been a subject of speculation by some of his biographers. He
sometimes said: "God is calculating."[93] Gauss was a member of the Lutheran church, like most of
the population in northern Germany, but it seems that he did not believe all dogmas or understand
the Holy Bible to be true quite literally.[94] Sartorius mentioned Gauss' religious tolerance, and
estimated his "insatiable thirst for truth" and his sense of justice as motivated by religious
convictions.[80]

Gauss had an "aristocratic and through and through conservative nature", with little respect for
people's intelligence and morals, in accordance with the motto "mundus vult decipi". As far as the
political system is concerned, he had a low estimation of the constitutional system; he criticized
parliamentarians of his time for a lack of knowledge and logical errors.[91] Gauss was loyal to the
House of Hanover, disliked Napoleon and his system, and all kind of violence and revolution caused
horror to him. Thus he condemned the methods of the Revolutions of 1848, though he agreed with
some of their aims, such as the idea of a unified Germany.[77][k]

Gauss was a successful investor and accumulated considerable wealth with stocks and securities, but
he disapproved of the idea of paper money.[95] After his death a great sum of money was found
hidden in his rooms.[96]
Scientific work

Algebra and number theory

Fundamental theorem of algebra

German stamp
commemorating Gauss'
200th anniversary: the
complex plane

In his doctoral thesis from 1799 Gauss proved the fundamental theorem of algebra which states that
every non-constant single-variable polynomial with complex coefficients has at least one complex
root. Mathematicians including Jean le Rond d'Alembert had produced false proofs before him, and
Gauss' dissertation contains a critique of d'Alembert's work. He subsequently produced three other
proofs, the last one in 1849 being generally rigorous. His attempts clarified the concept of complex
numbers considerably along the way.[97] Gauss was the first one who used the symbol i for
representing the imaginary number.[98]

Disquisitiones Arithmeticae

The entries in Gauss' Mathematical diary indicate that he was busy with the subject of number
theory at least since 1796. A detailed study of previous researches showed him that some of his
findings had been already done by other scholars. In the years 1798 and 1799 Gauss wrote a
voluminous compilation of all these results in the famous Disquisitiones Arithmeticae, published in
1801, that was fundamental in consolidating number theory as a discipline and covered both
elementary and algebraic number theory. Therein he introduces, among other things, the triple bar
symbol (≡) for congruence and uses it in a clean presentation of modular arithmetic. It deals with the
unique factorization theorem and primitive roots modulo n. In the main chapters, Gauss presents
the first two proofs of the law of quadratic reciprocity, which allows mathematicians to determine
the solvability of any quadratic equation in modular arithmetic, and develops the theories of binary
and ternary quadratic forms.

Highlights of these theories include the remarkable Gauss composition law for binary quadratic
forms, as well as his enumeration of the number of representations of an integer as sum of three
squares. As an almost immediate corollary of his theorem on three squares, he proves the triangular
case of the Fermat polygonal number theorem for n = 3. From several remarkable analytic results on
class numbers that Gauss gives without proof towards the end of the fifth chapter, it appears that
Gauss already knew the class number formula in 1801.[99]

In the last chapter Gauss gives his proof for the constructibility of a regular heptadecagon (17-sided
polygon) with straightedge and compass by reducing this geometrical to an algebraic problem. He
shows that a regular polygon is constructible if the number of its sides is a product of distinct
Fermat primes and a power of 2. In the same chapter, he gives a result on the number of solutions
of certain cubic polynomials with coefficients in finite fields, which amounts to counting integral
points on an elliptic curve. Some 150 years later, Andre Weil remarked that this particular result,
together with some other unpublished results of Gauss, led him to formulate what is now called Weil
conjectures.[100][l]

Gauss intended to include an eighth chapter that will treat the topic of higher congruences modulo
a prime number in its full generality, but the unfinished chapter was found among his papers only
after his death, consisting of work done during the years 1797–1799. It contains a systematic theory
of finite fields, among other things; one particular result of special importance is a counting formula
for the number of irreducible polynomials of a given degree over a finite field.[m] He also makes use
of the powerful tool of the Frobenius automorphism to explore the subfields of finite fields. Gauss
finishes the chapter by indicating possible generalizations of his investigations, and proves an early
version of "Hensel lemma", which enables to lift modular properties with respect to a prime p into
ever growing powers of the same prime.[102]

It is unclear how much Gauss was aware of the importance of the last result, but there are
indications he was aware of some sort of a p-adic method, such as his motive to prove his lemma on
polynomials[103] or his method of deriving Hensel's lemma.[102] In the beginning of the 20th century,
Kurt Hensel introduced p-adic numbers, and in this way shed light on these investigations and
brought them to conceptual maturity.
Further investigations

In 1831, Ludwig August Seeber published a book on the theory of reduction of positive ternary
quadratic forms,[104] with accordance with the program outlined in Gauss's Disquisitiones. However,
he did not prove a central theorem of his theory, so it remained a mere conjecture. In his review of
Seeber's book, Gauss simplified many of Seeber's lengthy arguments, proved this central conjecture,
and remarked that this theorem is equivalent to Kepler conjecture for regular arrangements.[105]

Gauss proved Fermat's Last Theorem for n = 3 and sketchingly proved it for n = 5 in his unpublished
writings. The particular case of n = 3 was proved much earlier by Leonhard Euler, but Gauss
developed a more streamlined proof which made use of Eisenstein integers; though more general,
the proof was simpler than in the real integers case.

Among his published number theoretical works, his two papers on biquadratic residues (published
in 1828 and 1832) are considered second in importance only to Disquisitions Arithmeticae. In these
papers Gauss introduces the ring of Gaussian integers , and shows that this ring is a unique
factorization domain. Furthermore, he generalizes into this ring many key arithmetic concepts, such
as Fermat's little theorem and Gauss's lemma. The main objective of introducing this ring was to
formulate the law of biquadratic reciprocity – as Gauss discovered, rings of complex integers are the
natural setting for such higher reciprocity laws.

In the second paper, he states the general law of biquadratic reciprocity and proves several special
cases of it, but proof of the general theorem is lacking, despite Gauss's statements that he found
such a proof around 1814. He promised a third paper with a general proof, but this never appeared.
In an earlier publication from 1818 containing his fifth and sixth proofs of quadratic reciprocity, he
claims the techniques of these proofs (Gauss sums) can be applied to prove higher reciprocity laws.
In his posthumous papers, two proofs of the general case were found: one is believed to be not
original of Gauss but rather based in its principles on Gotthold Eisenstein's proof, while the other
was an highly original proof based on geometrical considerations involving counting lattice points in
certain geometric figures. Despite its originality, the geometric proof is very long and cumbersome,
and this may be the reason why he withheld its publication after he saw Eisenstein's much more
direct proof.

Gauss's publications on biquadratic residues opened the way for boundless enlargement of the
theory of numbers, and are memorable for the wealth of investigations in "higher arithmetic" that
they led to.
Analysis

One of Gauss's first independent discoveries was the notion of the arithmetic-geometric mean
(AGM) of two positive real numbers; his systematic investigations on the AGM led him to discover an
unusually rich mathematical landscape, and to obtain plenty of new results associated with it. He
discovered its relation to elliptic integrals in the years 1798-1799 through the so-called Landen's
transformation, and in a diary entry recorded his discovery of the connection of Gauss's constant to
lemniscatic elliptic functions, a result that Gauss stated that "will surely open a new area of analysis".
He also made early inroads into the more formal issues of the foundations of complex analysis, and
from a letter to Bessel in 1811 it is clear that he knew the so called "fundamental theorem of
complex analysis" - Cauchy's integral theorem - and understood the notion of complex residues
when integrating around poles.

Another source of inspiration for Gauss's early work in analysis was his acquaintance with Euler's
pentagonal numbers theorem. This theorem together with his other researches on the AGM and
lemniscatic functions led him to plenty of results on Jacobi theta functions, work which culminated
with his discovery in 1808 of the very general Jacobi triple product identity, which includes Euler's
theorem as a special case.[106] In his publication from 1811 on the determination of the sign of
quadratic Gauss sum, Gauss solved the problem by introducing Gaussian binomial coefficients and
by using a line of reasoning that somehow "hides" its origin in theta function theory, as later
mathematicians have shown. All this work was done several decades before the publication of
Jacobi's "Fundamenta nova" in 1829; however, Gauss never found the time to systematically write
and organize all his thoughts and theorems of this kind, and his contemporaries never knew the
scope of his work.

Several mathematical fragments in his Nachlass indicate that he knew quite well parts of the modern
theory of modular forms of Felix Klein and Robert Fricke. In his work on the multivalued AGM of two
complex numbers, he discovered a very deep connection between the infinitely many values of the
AGM to its two "simplest values".[107] His unpublished writings include several drawings that show
he was quite aware of the geometric side of the theory; in the context of his work on the complex
AGM he recognized and made a sketch of the key concept of fundamental domain for the modular
group[n]. Perhaps the most remarkable of Gauss's sketches of this kind was his drawing of a
tessellation of the unit disk by "equilateral" hyperbolic triangles with all angles equal to .

In his lifetime Gauss published almost nothing about those more modern theories of elliptic
functions, but he did publish most of his results on the related theme of the hypergeometric
function. In his work "Disquisitiones generales circa series infinitam..." (1812), he provided the first
systematic treatment of the general hypergeometric function , and showed that many
of the functions known to science at the time, such as the elementary functions and some special
functions, are a special case of the hypergeometric function.[108] This work was the first one with an
exact inquiry of convergence of infinite series in the history of mathematics.[109] Furthermore, it dealt
with infinite continued fractions arising as ratios of hypergeometric functions.

In 1822 Gauss published his prize winning essay on conformal mappings, which contains several
developments that pertain to the field of complex analysis. In this essay, Gauss made explicit the
insight that angle-preserving mappings in the complex plane must be complex analytic functions,
and used the so-called Beltrami equation to prove the existence of isothermal coordinates on
analytic surfaces. The essay concludes with examples of conformal mappings into a sphere and an
ellipsoid of revolution. In addition, in unpublished fragments from the years 1834-1839 he
investigated and solved the more difficult task of explicitly constructing a conformal mapping from
the interior of an ellipse to the unit disk.[110] His solution, which combined his early work on elliptic
functions and his later ideas on potential theory, reveals his mastery of the theory of logarithmic
potential, and his final results corresponded to the formula found by Hermann Schwarz in 1870.

Numeric analysis

Gauss often deduced theorems inductively from numerical data he had collected in an empirical
way. As such, the use of efficient algorithms to facilitate calculations was vital to his researches, and
he made many contributions to numeric analysis. In 1815, he published an article on numeric
integration, in which he described his method of Gaussian quadrature, that greatly improved
existing methods and inspired much of the work made by later mathematicians.

In a private letter to Gerling from 1823,[111] he described a solution of a certain 4X4 system of linear
equations by using Gauss-Seidel method – an "indirect" iterative method for the solution of linear
systems, that in some cases converges very rapidly to the exact solution. Gauss recommended it
over the usual method (the so called "direct elimination") for systems of more than 2 equations,
stating that it can be done "while half asleep, or while thinking about other things".[112] As such, it
was an early contribution to numerical linear algebra.

Gauss invented an algorithm for calculating discrete Fourier transforms, sometimes called "the most
important numerical algorithm of our lifetime", when calculating the orbits of Pallas and Juno in
1805, 160 years before Cooley and Tukey published their similar Cooley–Tukey FFT algorithm.[113] He
developed it as a trigonometric interpolation method, but his paper Theoria Interpolationis Methodo
Nova Tractata was published only posthumously in 1866,[114] preceded by the first presentation by
Joseph Fourier on the subject in 1807.[115]
Chronology

The first publication following the doctoral thesis dealt with the determination of the date of Easter
(1800), a very elementary matter of mathematics. Gauss aimed to present a most convenient
algorithm for people without any knowledge in ecclesiastical or even astronomical chronology, and
thus avoided the usually required terms of golden number, epact, solar cycle, and domenical letter,
and any religious connotations.[116] Biographers speculated on the reason why Gauss dealt with this
matter, but it is likely comprehensible by the historical background. The replacement of the Julian
calendar by the Gregorian calendar had caused great confusion to the hundreds of states of the
Holy Roman Empire since the 16th century, and was finished in Germany not until the year 1700,
when the difference of eleven days was deleted, but the difference in calculating the date of Easter
remained between Protestant and Catholic territories. A further agreement of 1776 equalized the
confessional way of counting, thus in the Protestant states like the Duchy of Brunswick the Easter of
1777, five weeks before Gauss' birth, was the first one calculated in the new manner.[117] The public
difficulties of replacement may be the historical background for the confusion on this matter in the
Gauss family (see chapter: Anecdotes). For being connected with the Easter regulations, an essay on
the date of Pesach followed soon in 1802.

Carl Friedrich Gauss 1803 by

Johann Christian August
Schwartz

Astronomy

On 1 January 1801, Italian astronomer Giuseppe Piazzi discovered the dwarf planet Ceres.[118] Piazzi
could track Ceres for only somewhat more than a month, following it for three degrees across the
night sky, less than 1% of the total orbit, until it disappeared temporarily behind the glare of the
Sun. Several months later, when Ceres should have reappeared, Piazzi could not locate it: the
mathematical tools of the time were not able to extrapolate a position from such a scant amount of
data. Gauss tackled the problem within three months of intense work, and predicted a position for
Ceres in December 1801. This turned out to be accurate within a half-degree when it was
rediscovered by Franz Xaver von Zach on 7/31 December at Gotha, and independently by Heinrich
Olbers on 1/2 January in Bremen.[119][o] This confirmation eventually led to the classification of Ceres
as minor-planet designation 1 Ceres; that was taken as the predicted planet between Mars and
Jupiter by the most speculative Titius–Bode law.[25]

Gauss's method involved determining a conic section in space, given one focus (the Sun) and the
conic's intersection with three given lines (lines of sight from the Earth, which is itself moving on an
ellipse, to the planet) and given the time it takes the planet to traverse the arcs determined by these
lines (from which the lengths of the arcs can be calculated by Kepler's Second Law). This problem
leads to an equation of the eighth degree, of which one solution, the Earth's orbit, is known. The
solution sought is then separated from the remaining six based on physical conditions. In this work,
Gauss used comprehensive approximation methods which he created for that purpose.[120] Zach
noted that "without the intelligent work and calculations of Doctor Gauss we might not have found
Ceres again".

The discovery of Ceres led Gauss to his work on a theory of the motion of planetoids disturbed by
large planets, eventually published in 1809 as Theoria motus corporum coelestium in sectionibus
conicis solem ambientum. In the process, he so streamlined the cumbersome mathematics of 18th-
century orbital prediction that his work remains a cornerstone of astronomical computation.[121] It
introduced the Gaussian gravitational constant.

Since the new asteroids had been discovered, Gauss occupied himself with the perturbations of their
orbital elements. Firstly he examined Ceres with analytical methods similar to those of Laplace, but
his favorite object was Pallas, because of its great eccentricity and orbital inclination, whereby
Laplace's method did not work. Gauss used his own tools : the arithmetic–geometric mean, the
hypergeometric function, and his method of interpolation.[122] He found an orbital resonance with
Jupiter in proportion 18 : 7 in 1812; Gauss published this result as cipher, and gave the explicit
meaning only in letters to Olbers and Bessel.[123][124][p] However, after long years he finished his
work in 1816 without a result that seemed sufficient to him. This marked the end of his activities in
theoretical astronomy, too.[126]

One fruit of Gauss's research on Pallas perturbations was his article Determinatio Attractionis... (1818)
on a method of theoretical astronomy that later became known as the "elliptic ring method". This
method introduced a useful averaging conception in which a planet in orbit is replaced by a
fictitious ring with mass density proportional to the time taking the planet to follow the
corresponding orbital arcs.[127] Gauss presents his method of evaluating the gravitational attraction
of such an elliptic ring, which includes several complicated steps; one such step involves a direct
application of the arithmetic-geometric mean (AGM) algorithm to calculate an elliptic integral.[q] In
the late 19th century Gauss's method was adapted by American astronomer George William Hill,
who applied it directly to the problem of secular perturbation induced by Venus on Mercury
orbit.[128]

Theory of errors

It is likely that Gauss used the method of least squares for calculating the orbit of Ceres to minimize
the impact of measurement error.[10] The method was published first by Adrien-Marie Legendre in
1805, but Gauss claimed in Theoria motus (1809) that he had been using it since 1794 or 1795.[9] In
the history of statistics, this disagreement is called the "priority dispute over the discovery of the
method of least squares".[62] Gauss proved the method under the assumption of normally
distributed errors (Gauss–Markov theorem) in his paper Theoria combinationis observationum
erroribus minimis obnoxiae from 1821.

In this paper, which was relatively little known in the English speaking world in the first century after
its publication, he stated and proved Gauss's inequality (a Chebyshev-type inequality) for unimodal
distributions, and stated without proof another inequality for moments of the fourth order (a special
case of Gauss-Winckler inequality).[129] He derived lower and upper bounds for the variance of
sample variance.[r] In a supplement to this paper Gauss described recursive least squares methods
that went unnoticed until 1950, when his work was rediscovered as a consequence of the growing
demand of quick estimation for various new technologies. Gauss's work on the theory of errors was
extended in several directions by the geodesist Friedrich Robert Helmert, and the Gauss-Helmert
theory is considered today as the "classical" theory of errors.

Gauss made several striking contributions to problems in probability theory that are not directly
concerned with the theory of errors, but offer a glimpse into his broad minded view on the
applicability of probabilistic thinking. One remarkable example appears as a note in his diary and is
concerned with a very unusual problem that came to his mind: to describe the asymptotic
distribution of entries in the continued fraction expansion of a random number uniformly distributed
in (0,1). He derived this distribution, now known as the Gauss-Kuzmin distribution, as a by-product
of his discovery of the ergodicity of the Gauss map for continued fractions. Gauss's solution is the
first ever result in the metrical theory of continued fractions.
 Order of King George IV to
the triangulation project

Arc measurement and geodetic survey

Gauss was busy with geodetic problems since 1799, when he helped Karl Ludwig von Lecoq with
calculations during his survey in Westphalia.[130] Later since 1804, he taught himself some geodetic
practise with a sextant in Brunswick,[131] and Göttingen.[132]

Since 1816, his former student Heinrich Christian Schumacher, then professor in Copenhagen, but
living in Altona (Holstein) near Hamburg, made a triangulation of the Jutland peninsula from Skagen
in the north to Lauenburg in the south.[s] The aim was not only the foundation of map production,
but also the determination of the geodetic arc of that distance. Schumacher asked Gauss to
continue this work further to the south and said he could find support for this project directly from
the government of Hanover. Finally in May 1820, King George IV gave the order to Gauss.[133]

Gauss and Schumacher had yet determined some angles between Lüneburg, Hamburg, and
Lauenburg for the geodetic connection in October 1818.[134] During the summers of 1821 until 1825
Gauss directed the triangulation personally, that reached from Thuringia in the south to the river
Elbe in the north. The triangel between Hoher Hagen, Großer Inselsberg in the Thuringian Forest,
and Brocken in the Harz mountains was the largest one Gauss had ever measured with a maximum
side of 107 km (66.5 miles). In the thin populated Lüneburg Heath, without significant natural
summits or artificial buildings, he had great difficulties to find suitable triangulation points,
sometimes cutting lanes through the vegetation was necessary or even the erection of signal
towers.[135]
 The heliotrope

Gauss' vice heliotrope, a Troughton

sextant with additional mirror

For pointing signals, Gauss invented a new instrument with movable mirrors and a small telescope
that reflects the sunbeams to the triangulation points, and named it heliotrope. Another suitable
construction for the same purpose was a sextant with an additional mirror which he named vice
heliotrope.[136] Gauss got assistance by soldiers of the Hanoveran army, among them his eldest son
Joseph. Gauss took part in the baseline measurement (Braak Base Line) of Schumacher in the village
Braak near Hamburg in 1820, and used the result for the evaluation of his triangulation.[137]

The arc measurement needed a precise astronomical determination of two points in the network.
Gauss and Schumacher used the favourite occasion that both observatories in Göttingen and in
Altona, in the garden of Schumacher's house, laid nearly in the same longitude. The latitude was
measured with both their own instruments and a zenith sector of Ramsden that was transported to
both observatories.[138][t]

An additional result was a better value of flattening of the approximative earth ellipsoid.[139][u] Gauss
developed the universal transverse Mercator projection of the ellipsoidal shaped earth (what he
named conform projection)[141] for representing geodetical data in plane charts.

When the arc measurement was finished, Gauss intended the enlargement of the triangulation to
the west to get a survey of the whole Kingdom of Hanover. The practical work was directed by three
army officers, among them Lieutenant Joseph Gauss. The complete data evaluation laid in the hands
of Carl Friedrich Gauss, who applied his mathematical inventions as the method of least squares and
his elimination method to it. The project was finished in 1844, but Gauss did not publish a final
report of the project and his method of projection; this work was not done until 1866.[142][143]

In 1828, when studying differences in latitude, Gauss first defined a physical approximation for the
figure of the Earth as the surface everywhere perpendicular to the direction of gravity;[144] later his
doctoral student Johann Benedict Listing called this the geoid.[145]

Differential geometry

The geodetic survey of Hanover fueled Gauss' interest in differential geometry and topology, fields
of mathematics dealing with curves and surfaces. This led him in 1828 to the publication of a
memoir that marks the birth of modern differential geometry of surfaces, as it departed from the
traditional ways of treating surfaces as cartesian graphs of functions of two variables, and instead
pioneered a revolutionary approach that initiated the exploration of surfaces from the "inner" point
of view of a two-dimensional being constrained to move on it. Its crowning result, the Theorema
Egregium (remarkable theorem), established a property of the notion of Gaussian curvature.
Informally, the theorem says that the curvature of a surface can be determined entirely by
measuring angles and distances on the surface. That is, curvature does not depend on how the
surface might be embedded in 3-dimensional space or 2-dimensional space.

The Theorema Egregium leads to the abstraction of surfaces as doubly-extended manifolds - it

makes clear the distinction between the intrinsic properties of the manifold (the metric) and its
physical realization (the embedding) in ambient space. A consequence is the impossibility of an
isometric transformation between surfaces of different Gaussian curvature. This means practically
that a sphere or an ellipsoid cannot be transformed to a plane without distortion, what causes a
fundamental problem in designing projections for geographical maps.

An additional significant portion of his essay is dedicated to a profound study of geodesics. In

particular, Gauss proves the local Gauss-Bonnet theorem on geodesic triangles, and generalizes
Legendre's theorem on spherical triangles to geodesic triangles on arbitrary surfaces with
continuous curvature; he found that the angles of a "sufficiently small" geodesic triangle deviate
from that of a planar triangle of the same sides in a way that depends only on the values of the
surface curvature at the vertices of the triangle - regardless of the behaviour of the surface in the
triangle interior.

One key differential geometric conception was lacking from Gauss's memoir, that of geodesic
curvature. However, his posthumous papers show that this notion did not escape his mind, and in
the years of composing his memoir he also wrote up a manuscript in which he introduced it and
referred to it as "side curvature" (in German: "Seitenkrümmung"). More importantly, he proved its
invariance under isometric transformations, a result later obtained by Ferdinand Minding. Based on
this evidence and the announcement in his memoir of further investigations on the curvature
integral, it is very likely that he knew the more general version of the Gauss-Bonnet theorem proved
by Pierre Ossian Bonnet in 1848, which is closer in spirit to the global version of this theorem.[146][v]

Non-Euclidean geometries

Lithography by Siegfried
Bendixen (1828)

Gauss was undoubtedly the first to discover and analyze non-Euclidean geometries,[12][14] despite
never publishing.[147] He is the one who coined the term "non-Euclidean geometry".[13] This
discovery was a major paradigm shift in mathematics, as it freed mathematicians from the mistaken
belief that Euclid's axioms were the only way to make geometry consistent and non-contradictory.
Research on these geometries led to, among other things, Einstein's theory of general relativity,
which describes the universe as non-Euclidean.

Gauss' friend Farkas Bolyai with whom he had sworn "brotherhood and the banner of truth" as a
student, had tried in vain for many years to prove the parallel postulate from Euclid's other axioms
of geometry. Bolyai's son Janos discovered non-Euclidean geometry in 1829 and published his work
in 1832. After seeing it, Gauss wrote to Farkas Bolyai: "To praise it would amount to praising myself.
For the entire content of the work ... coincides almost exactly with my own meditations which have
occupied my mind for the past thirty or thirty-five years."[148] This statement put a strain on his
relationship with Janos Bolyai who thought that Gauss was stealing his idea.[149]

Letters from Gauss years before 1829 reveal him obscurely discussing the problem of parallel lines.
Dunnington argues that Gauss was in fact in full possession of non-Euclidean geometry long before
it was published by Bolyai, but that he refused to publish any of it because of his fear of
controversy.[150][4]
In 1854, Gauss selected the topic for Bernhard Riemann's inaugural lecture Über die Hypothesen,
welche der Geometrie zu Grunde liegen from three proposals.[151][152] On the way home from
Riemann's lecture, Weber reported that Gauss was full of praise and excitement.[153]

Magnetism and telegraphy

Geomagnetism

Gauss-Weber monument in
Göttingen

The Gauss-Weber magnetometer

Gauss' interest in magnetism is obvious since the first decennium of the 19th century. Since 1826,
when Alexander von Humboldt visited him in Göttingen, both scientists began intensive research on
geomagnetism, partly independent, partly in productive cooperation.[154] In 1828, Gauss was
Humboldt's personal guest during the conference of the Society of German Natural Scientists and
Physicians in Berlin, where he got acquaintance with the physicist Wilhelm Weber.[155]

When Weber got the chair for physics in Göttingen as successor of Johann Tobias Mayer by Gauss'
recommendation in 1831, both of them started a fruitful collaboration, leading to a new knowledge
of magnetism with a representation for the unit of magnetism in terms of mass, charge, and
time.[156] They founded the Magnetic Association (German: "Magnetischer Verein"), an international
working group of several observatories, which supported measurements of Earth's magnetic field in
many regions of the world with equal methods at arranged dates in the years 1836 to 1841. In 1836,
Humboldt was helpful to organize the worldwide spread of observatories including the British
dominions with a letter to the Duke of Sussex, then president of the Royal Society, wherein he asked
for support for a program of global research based on Gauss' methods.[157] Together with other
instigators, this led to a global programm known as "Magnetical crusade" under directory of Edward
Sabine. The dates, times, and intervalls of observations were determined in advance, the Göttingen
mean time was used as standard.[158] Finally 61 stations participated in this global program. Gauss
and Weber founded a series for the publication of the results, six volumes were edited between
1837 and 1843. Weber's departure to Leipzig in 1843 as late effect of the Göttingen Seven affair
marked the end of Magnetic Assiciation activity.[159]

Following Humboldt's example, Gauss ordered a magnetic observatory to be built in the garden of
his observatory, but both scientists differed over instrumental equipment; Gauss preferred stationary
instruments, which he thaught to give more precise results, whereas Humboldt was accustomed to
movable instruments. Gauss was interested in the temporal and spatial variation of magnetic
declination, inclination, and intensity, but discriminated Humboldt's concept of magnetic intensity to
the terms of "horizontal" and "vertical" intensity. Together with Weber, he developed methods of
measuring the components of intensity of the magnetic field, and constructed a suitable
magnetometer to measure absolute values of the strength of the Earth's magnetic field, not more
relative ones that depended on the apparatus.[159] The precision of the magnetometer was about
ten times higher than of previous instruments. With this work, Gauss was the first one who derived a
non-mechanical quantity by basic mechanical quantities.[158]

Gauss carried out a "General Theory of Terrestrial Magnetism" (1839), in what he believed to
describe the nature of magnetic Force; following Felix Klein, this work is actually a presentation of
observations by use of spherical harmonics rather than a physical theory.[160] The theory predicted
the existence of exactly two magnetic poles on the earth, thus Hansteen's idea of four magnetic
poles became obsolete,[161] and the data allowed to determine their location with rather good
precision.[162] In his "General theorems concerning the attractive and repulsive forces acting in
reciprocal proportions of quadratic distances" (1840) Gauss gave the baseline of a theory of the
magnetic potential, based on Lagrange, Laplace, and Poisson;[160] it seems rather unlikely that he
had knowledge of the previous works of George Green on this subject.[163] However, Gauss could
never give any reasons for magnetism, nor a theory of magnetism similar to Newton's work on
gravitation, that enabled scientists to predict geomagnetic effects in the future.[158]

Gauss got a remarkable influence on the begin of geophysics in Russia, when Adolph Theodor
Kupffer, one of his former students, founded a magnetic observatory in St. Petersburg, following the
eample of the observatory in Götttingen, and similar Ivan Simonov in Kazan.[161]
Electromagnetism

Town plan of Göttingen with

course of the telegraphic
connection

The discoveries of Hans Christian Ørsted on electromagnetism and Michael Faraday on

electromagnetic induction drew Gauss' attention to these matters.[163] Gauss and Weber found the
rules for branched electric circuits, later benamed as Kirchhoff's circuit laws,[164] and made inquiries
on electromagnetism. They constructed the first electromechanical telegraph in 1833, and Weber
himself connected the observatory with the institute for physics in the town centre of Göttingen,[w]
but they did not care for any further development of this invention with regard to commercial
purposes.[165][166][167]

Gauss's main theoretical interests in electromagnetism were reflected in his attempts to formulate
quantitive laws governing electromagnetic induction. In his notebooks from these years, he
recorded several innovative formulations; he discovered the idea of vector potential function
(independently rediscovered by Franz Ernst Neumann in 1845), and in January 1835 he wrote down
an "induction law" equivalent to Faraday's law, which stated that the electromotive force at a given
point in space is equal to the instantaneous rate of change (with respect to time) of this function.

In the same year Gauss had an insightful speculative thought, according to which electromagnetic
interaction between two electric charges propagates in space in finite speed, in a manner similar to
light, and that the magnitude of this interaction might depend on their relative velocity. In this way,
he refuted the notion of immediate action at a distance. In unpublished fragments and in an 1845
letter to Weber, Gauss attempted to unite electricity and magnetism by forming a single expression
for the interaction between two charges in relative motion, from which both Coulomb's law and the
effects of magnetism could be derived.

His unpublished insights in these directions eventually merged into the so called Weber
electrodynamics, a theory that became obsolete today due to some essential difficulties to reconcile
it with the undisputed Maxwell's theory. In retrospect, despite its incorrectness, the Gauss-Weber
theory contained some of the germs of later ideas, such as the existence of an electromagnetic field
that is in some sense independent of its point sources (Faraday's view), as well as the notion of
retarded potential.

Optics

Instrument maker Johann Georg Repsold in Hamburg asked Gauss in 1807 for help to construct an
achromatic lens system. Based on Gauss' calculations, Repsold succeeded with a new objective in
1810. A main problem, among other difficulties, was the non precise knowledge of the refractive
index and dispersion of the used glass types. In a short article from 1817 Gauss dealt with the
problem of removal of chromatic aberration in double lenses, and made calculations about
adjustments of the shape and coefficients of refraction required to minimize it. His work was noted
by the optician Carl August von Steinheil, who in 1860 indroduced the achromatic Steinheil doublet,
based in part on Gauss's calculations.[168] Many results in geometrical optics are scattered in Gauss's
correspondences and handnotes.

In his influential Dioptrical Investigations (1840), Gauss gave the first systematic analysis on the
formation of images under a paraxial approximation (Gaussian optics).[169] Gauss demonstrated, that
under a paraxial approximation an optical system can be characterized by its cardinal points,[170] and
he derived the Gaussian lens formula, applicable without restrictions in respect to the thickness of
the lenses.[171][172]

Gauss bust by
HeinrichHesemann (1855)
Mechanics

Gauss' first and last business in mechanics concerned the earth's rotation. When his university friend
Benzenberg carried out experiments to determine the deviation of falling masses from the
perpendicular in 1802, what today is known as an effect of the Coriolis force, he asked Gauss for a
theory based calculation of the values for comparison with the experimental ones. Gauss elaborated
a system of fundamental equations for the motion, and his results correspondent sufficiently with
Benzenberg's data, who published Gauss' considerations as appendix to his book on falling
experiments.[173]

After Foucault had demonstrated his pendulum in public in 1851, Gerling questioned Gauss for
further explanations. This instigated Gauss to design a new apparatus for demonstration with a
much shorter length of pendulum than Foucault's one. The oscillations were observed with a
reading telescope, with a vertical scale and a mirror fastened at the pendulum; the time of oscillation
was 3.1 seconds. It is described in the Gauss–Gerling correspondence, and Weber made some
experiments with this obviously working apparatus in 1853, but no data were published.[174][175]

Gauss's principle of least constraint of 1829 was established as a general concept to overcome the
division of mechanics into statics and dynamics, combining D'Alembert's principle with Lagrange's
principle of Virtual Work, and showing analogies to the method of least squares.[176]

Metrology

In 1828, Gauss was appointed to head of a Board for weights and measures of the Kingdom of
Hanover. He provided the creation of standards of length and measures. Gauss himself took care of
the time-consuming measures and gave detailed orders for the mechanical preparation.[117] In his
correspondence with Schumacher, who was also working on this matter, he described new ideas for
scales of high precision.[177] He gave his final reports on the Hanoveran foot and pound to the
government in 1841. This work got more than regional importance by the order of a law of 1836,
that connected the Hanoveran measures with the English ones.[117]
Anecdotes

Parochial registration of Gauss'

christening on 4 May 1777 with later
added birth date

Several stories of his early genius have been reported. Carl Friedrich Gauss' mother had 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.[178] Gauss later solved this
puzzle about his birthdate in the context of finding the date of Easter, deriving methods to compute
the date in both past and future years.[179] Gauss felt sorry for his new born daughter Wilhelmine,
because she was born on the leap day in 1808 and thus would celebrate her birthday only every four
years.[180]

In his memorial on Gauss, Wolfgang Sartorius von Waltershausen tells a story about the three-years-
aged Gauss, who corrected a math error his father made. The most popular story, also told by
Sartorius, tells of a school exercise: the teacher J.G. Büttner and his assistant Martin Bartels ordered
students to add an arithmetic series. Out of about a hundred pupils, Gauss was the first to solve the
problem correctly by a significant margin.[181] Although (or because) Sartorius gave no details, in the
course of time many versions of this story have been created, with more and more details regarding
the nature of the series – the most frequent being the classical problem of adding together all the
integers from 1 to 100 – and the circumstances in the classroom.[182][x]

Gauss' favorite English author was Walter Scott, but when he sometimes read the words "the moon
rises broad in the nord west", he was very amused.[184]

Gauss referred to mathematics as "the queen of sciences" and arithmetics as "the queen of
mathematics",[185] and supposedly once espoused a belief in the necessity of immediately
understanding Euler's identity as a benchmark pursuant to becoming a first-class mathematician.[186]
Honours and awards

Copley Medal for Gauss

(1838)

The first membership of a scientific society was given to Gauss in 1802 by the Russian Academy of
Sciences. Further memberships (corresponding, foreign or full) were from the Academy of Sciences
in Göttingen (1802/ 1807),[187] the French Academy of Sciences (1804/ 1820),[188] the Royal Society
of London (1804),[189] the Royal Prussian Academy in Berlin (1810),[190] the National Academy of
Science in Verona (1810),[191] the Royal Society of Edinburgh (1820),[192] the Bavarian Academy of
Sciences of Munich (1820),[193] the Royal Danish Academy in Copenhagen (1821), the Royal
Astronomical Society in London (1821),[194] the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (1821), the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Boston (1822),[195] the Royal Bohemian Society of
Sciences in Prague (1833), the Royal Academy of Science, Letters and Fine Arts of Belgium (1841/
1845),[196] the Royal Society of Sciences in Uppsala (1843), the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin (1843),
the Royal Institute of the Netherlands (1845/ 1851),[197] the Spanish Royal Academy of Sciences in
Madrid (1850),[198] the Russian Geographical Society (1851), the Imperial Academy of Sciences in
Vienna (1848), the American Philosophical Society (1853),[199] the Cambridge Philosophical Society,
and the Royal Hollandish Society of Sciences in Haarlem.[200]

Gauss was an honorary member of the University of Kazan and of the Philosophy Faculty of the
University of Prague since 1849.

Gauss received the Lalande Prize from the French Academy of Science in 1809 for the theory of
planets and the means of determining their orbits from only three observations,[201] the Danish
Academy of Science prize in 1823 for "his study of angle-preserving maps", and the Copley Medal
from the Royal Society in 1838 for "his inventions and mathematical researches in magnetism".[200]

Gauss was appointed Knight of the French Legion of Honour[202] in 1837 and was one of the first
members of the Prussian Order Pour le Merite (Civil class) when it was established in 1842.[203]
Furthermore, he received the Order of the Crown of Westphalia (1810), the Danish Order of the
Dannebrog (1817), the Hanoverian Royal Guelphic Order (1815), the Swedish Order of the Polar Star
(1844), the Order of Henry the Lion (1849), and the Bavarian Maximilian Order for Science and Art
(1853).[200]

The Kings of Hanover appointed him the honorary titles "Hofrath" (1816)[75] and "Geheimer
Hofrath"[y] (1845). On the occasion of his golden doctor degree jubilee he got the honorary
citizenship of both towns of Brunswick and Göttingen in 1849.[200] Soon after his death a medal was
issued by order of King George V of Hanover with the back side inscription : GEORGIVS V REX
HANNOVERAE MATHEMATICORVM PRINCIPI and the circumscription : ACADEMIAE SVAE GEORGIAE
AVGVSTAE DECORI AETERNO.[204]

The ″Gauss-Gesellschaft Göttingen″ (Gauss Society) was founded in 1964 for researches on life and
work of Carl Friedrich Gauss and related persons and edits the ″Mitteilungen der Gauss-Gesellschaft″
(Communications of the Gauss Society).[205]

Writings

Mathematics and astronomy

Statue of Gauss in Brunswick

(1880), made by Hermann
Heinrich Howaldt, designed
by Fritz Schaper
1799: Demonstratio nova theorematis omnem functionem algebraicam rationalem integram unius
variabilis in factores reales primi vel secundi gradus resolvi posse (https://gdz.sub.uni-goettingen.d
e/id/PPN235999628?tify=%7B%22pages%22%3A%5B5%5D%2C%22pan%22%3A%7B%22x%22%3
A0.469%2C%22y%22%3A0.692%7D%2C%22view%22%3A%22info%22%2C%22zoom%22%3A0.42
2%7D) [New proof of the theorem that every integral algebraic function of one variable can be
resolved into real factors of the first or second degree]. Helmstedt: C. G. Fleckeisen. (Doctoral thesis
on the fundamental theorem of algebra, University of Helmstedt) Original book (https://edoc.hu-b
erlin.de/handle/18452/732)

1816: "Demonstratio nova altera theorematis omnem functionem algebraicam rationalem

integram unius variabilis in factores reales primi vel secundi gradus resolvi posse" (https://gdz.sub.
uni-goettingen.de/id/PPN35283028X_0003_2NS?tify=%7B%22pages%22%3A%5B268%2C269%5
D%2C%22view%22%3A%22info%22%7D) . Commentationes Societatis Regiae Scientiarum
Gottingensis Recentiores. Comm. Class. Math. 3: 107–134.

1816: "Theorematis de resolubilitate functionum algebraicarum integrarum in factores reales

demonstratio tertia" (https://gdz.sub.uni-goettingen.de/id/PPN35283028X_0003_2NS?tify=%7B%2
2pages%22%3A%5B296%5D%2C%22view%22%3A%22info%22%7D) . Commentationes Societatis
Regiae Scientiarum Gottingensis Recentiores. Comm. Class. Math. 3: 135–142.

1850: "Beiträge zur Theorie der algebraischen Gleichungen" (https://gdz.sub.uni-goettingen.de/id/

PPN250442582_0004?tify=%7B%22pages%22%3A%5B287%5D%2C%22view%22%3A%22info%2
2%7D) . Abhandlungen der Königlichen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen. 4: 34–35.
Die vier Gauss'schen Beweise für die Zerlegung ganzer algebraischer Funktionen in reelle
Faktoren ersten und zweiten Grades. (1799–1849) (https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_LoW4AA
AAIAAJ/mode/2up) [The four Gaussian proofs of the fundamental theorem of algebra].
Translated by Netto. Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann. 1890. (German)

1800: "Berechnung des Osterfestes" (https://zs.thulb.uni-jena.de/receive/jportal_jpvolume_002019

70) [Calculation of Easter]. Monatliche Correspondenz zur Beförderung der Erd- und
Himmelskunde (in German). 2: 121–130. (Calculation of the date of Easter)

1801: Disquisitiones Arithmeticae (https://gdz.sub.uni-goettingen.de/id/PPN235993352?tify=%7

B%22pages%22%3A%5B5%5D%2C%22view%22%3A%22info%22%7D) . Leipzig: Gerh. Fleischer
jun.
Gauss, Carl Friedrich (1986). Disquisitiones Arithmeticae & other papers on number theory (htt
ps://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4939-7560-0#about-this-book) . Translated by
Clarke, Arthur A. (2nd, corrected ed.). New York: Springer. doi:10.1007/978-1-4939-7560-0 (htt
ps://doi.org/10.1007%2F978-1-4939-7560-0) . ISBN 978-0-387-96254-2.
1802: "Berechnung des jüdischen Osterfestes" (https://zs.thulb.uni-jena.de/rsc/viewer/jportal_deriv
ate_00237503/Monatlich_Correspondenz_130168688_5_1802_0444%20.tif) [Calculation of Jewish
Easter]. Monatliche Correspondenz zur Beförderung der Erd- und Himmelskunde (in German). 5:
435–437. (Calculation of the date of Pesach)

1808: "Theorematis arithmetici demonstratio nova" (https://gdz.sub.uni-goettingen.de/id/PPN352

83028X_0016_1NS?tify=%7B%22pages%22%3A%5B498%2C499%5D%2C%22view%22%3A%22inf
o%22%7D) . Commentationes Societatis Regiae Scientiarum Gottingensis. Comm. Math. 16: 69–74.
(Introduces Gauss's lemma, uses it in the third proof of quadratic reciprocity)

1809: Theoria motus corporum coelestium in sectionibus conicis solem ambientium (https://gdz.sub.
uni-goettingen.de/id/PPN236008730?tify=%7B%22pages%22%3A%5B7%5D%2C%22pan%22%3
A%7B%22x%22%3A0.453%2C%22y%22%3A0.658%7D%2C%22view%22%3A%22info%22%2C%22
zoom%22%3A0.507%7D) (in Latin). Hamburg: Friedrich Perthes & Johann Heinrich Besser.}
Original book (https://gutenberg.beic.it/webclient/DeliveryManager?pid=12217180)
Theory of the Motion of Heavenly Bodies Moving about the Sun in Conic Sections (https://archiv
e.org/details/theoryofmotionof00gausrich/) . Translated by Davis, Charles Henry. Little,
Brown & Co. 1857.

1811: "Disquisitio de elementis ellipticis Palladis ex oppositionibus annorum 1803, 1804, 1805,
1806, 1807, 1808, 1809" (https://gdz.sub.uni-goettingen.de/id/PPN35283028X_0001_2NS?tify=%7
B%22pages%22%3A%5B170%2C171%5D%2C%22view%22%3A%22info%22%7D) .
Commentationes Societatis Regiae Scientiarum Gottingensis Recentiores. Comm. Math. 1: 1–26.
(Orbit of Pallas)

1811: "Summatio quarundam serierum singularium" (https://gdz.sub.uni-goettingen.de/id/PPN35

283028X_0001_2NS?tify=%7B%22pages%22%3A%5B194%2C195%5D%2C%22view%22%3A%22in
fo%22%7D) . Commentationes Societatis Regiae Scientiarum Gottingensis Recentiores. Comm.
Class. Math. 1: 1–40. (Determination of the sign of the quadratic Gauss sum, uses this to give the
fourth proof of quadratic reciprocity)

1812: "Disquisitiones generales circa seriem infinitam " (https://gdz.sub.uni-goetti

ngen.de/id/PPN35283028X_0002_2NS?tify=%7B%22pages%22%3A%5B227%5D%2C%22pan%2
2%3A%7B%22x%22%3A0.559%2C%22y%22%3A0.496%7D%2C%22view%22%3A%22info%22%2
C%22zoom%22%3A0.456%7D) . Commentationes Societatis Regiae Scientiarum Gottingensis
Recentiores. Comm. Class. Math. 2: 1–42.

1815: "Methodus nova integralium valores per approximationem inveniendi" (https://gdz.sub.uni-

goettingen.de/id/PPN35283028X_0003_2NS?tify=%7B%22pages%22%3A%5B200%2C201%5D%2
C%22view%22%3A%22info%22%7D) . Commentationes Societatis Regiae Scientiarum
Gottingensis Recentiores. Comm. Class. Math. 3: 39–76.

1818: "Theorematis fundamentalis in doctrina de residuis quadraticis demonstrationes et

ampliationes novae" (https://gdz.sub.uni-goettingen.de/id/PPN35283028X_0004_2NS?tify=%7B%
22pages%22%3A%5B262%2C263%5D%2C%22view%22%3A%22info%22%7D) . Commentationes
Societatis Regiae Scientiarum Gottingensis Recentiores. Comm. Class. Math. 4: 3–20. (Fifth and sixth
proofs of quadratic reciprocity)

1818: "Demonstratio attractionis, quam in punctum positionis datae exerceret planeta, si eius
massa per totamorbitam, ratione temporis, quo singulae partes describuntur, uniformiter esset
dispertita" (https://gdz.sub.uni-goettingen.de/id/PPN35283028X_0004_2NS?tify=%7B%22pages%
22%3A%5B281%5D%2C%22pan%22%3A%7B%22x%22%3A0.499%2C%22y%22%3A0.677%7D%2
C%22view%22%3A%22info%22%2C%22zoom%22%3A0.434%7D) . Commentationes Societatis
Regiae Scientiarum Gottingensis Recentiores. Comm. Class. Math. 4: 21–48.

1821: "Theoria combinationis observationum erroribus minimis obnoxiae. Pars Prior" (https://gdz.s
ub.uni-goettingen.de/id/PPN35283028X_0005_2NS?tify=%7B%22pages%22%3A%5B276%5D%2
C%22view%22%3A%22info%22%7D) . Commentationes Societatis Regiae Scientiarum
Gottingensis Recentiores. Comm. Class. Math. 5: 33–62.

1823: "Theoria combinationis observationum erroribus minimis obnoxiae. Pars Posterior" (https://g
dz.sub.uni-goettingen.de/id/PPN35283028X_0005_2NS?tify=%7B%22pages%22%3A%5B306%5
D%2C%22pan%22%3A%7B%22x%22%3A0.413%2C%22y%22%3A0.66%7D%2C%22view%22%3
A%22info%22%2C%22zoom%22%3A0.413%7D) . Commentationes Societatis Regiae Scientiarum
Gottingensis Recentiores. Comm. Class. Math. 5: 63–90.

1828: Gauss, Carl Friedrich (1828). "Supplementum theoriae combinationis observationum

erroribus minimis obnoxiae" (https://gdz.sub.uni-goettingen.de/id/PPN35283028X_0006_2NS?tify
=%7B%22pages%22%3A%5B271%5D%2C%22view%22%3A%22info%22%7D) . Commentationes
Societatis Regiae Scientiarum Gottingensis Recentiores. Comm. Class. Math. Dieterich. 6: 57–98.
Bibcode:1828stco.book.....G (https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1828stco.book.....G) . (Three essays
concerning the calculation of probabilities as the basis of the Gaussian law of error propagation)
Gauss, Carl Friedrich; Stewart, G. W. (1995). Theory of the Combination of Observations Least
Subject to Errors. Part One, Part Two, Supplement (Classics in Applied Mathematics) (https://ep
ubs.siam.org/doi/book/10.1137/1.9781611971248) . Translated by G. W. Stewart.
Philadelphia: Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. doi:10.1137/1.9781611971248
(https://doi.org/10.1137%2F1.9781611971248) . ISBN 978-0-89871-347-3.
 1828: "Disquisitiones generales circa superficies curvas" (https://gdz.sub.uni-goettingen.de/id/PPN
35283028X_0006_2NS?tify=%7B%22pages%22%3A%5B312%2C313%5D%2C%22view%22%3A%2
2info%22%7D) . Commentationes Societatis Regiae Scientiarum Gottingensis Recentiores. Comm.
Class. Math. 6: 99–146.
General Investigations of Curved Surfaces (https://www.gutenberg.org/files/36856/36856-pdf.
pdf) (PDF). Translated by J. C. Morehead and A. M. Hiltebeitel. The Princeton University
Library. 1902.

1828: "Theoria residuorum biquadraticorum, Commentatio prima" (https://gdz.sub.uni-goettinge

n.de/id/PPN35283028X_0006_2NS?tify=%7B%22pages%22%3A%5B241%5D%2C%22view%22%3
A%22info%22%7D) . Commentationes Societatis Regiae Scientiarum Gottingensis Recentiores.
Comm. Class. Math. 6: 27–56.

1832: "Theoria residuorum biquadraticorum, Commentatio secunda" (https://gdz.sub.uni-goetting

en.de/id/PPN35283028X_0007_2NS?tify=%7B%22pages%22%3A%5B273%5D%2C%22view%22%3
A%22info%22%7D) . Commentationes Societatis Regiae Scientiarum Gottingensis Recentiores.
Comm. Class. Math. 7: 89–148. (Introduces the Gaussian integers, states (without proof) the law of
biquadratic reciprocity, proves the supplementary law for 1 + i)

1845: "Untersuchungen über Gegenstände der Höheren Geodäsie. Erste Abhandlung" (https://gd
z.sub.uni-goettingen.de/id/PPN250442582_0002) . Abhandlungen der Königlichen Gesellschaft der
Wissenschaften in Göttingen. Zweiter Band: 3–46.

1847: "Untersuchungen über Gegenstände der Höheren Geodäsie. Zweite Abhandlung" (https://g
dz.sub.uni-goettingen.de/id/PPN250442582_0003) . Abhandlungen der Königlichen Gesellschaft
der Wissenschaften in Göttingen. Dritter Band: 3–44.

Klein, Felix, ed. (1903), "Gauß' wissenschaftliches Tagebuch 1796–1814" (https://gdz.sub.uni-goetti

ngen.de/id/PPN235181684_0057?tify=%7B%22pages%22%3A%5B8%2C9%5D%2C%22view%22%
3A%22info%22%7D) , Mathematische Annalen (in Latin and German), 57: 1–34,
doi:10.1007/BF01449013 (https://doi.org/10.1007%2FBF01449013) , S2CID 119641638 (https://ap
i.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:119641638) Original book (https://gdz.sub.uni-goettingen.de/id/
DE-611-HS-3382323)
Jeremy Gray (1984). "A commentary on Gauss's mathematical diary, 1796–1814". Expositiones
Mathematicae. 2: 97–130.

Physics
1804: Gauss, Carl Friedrich. "Fundamentalgleichungen für die Bewegung schwerer Körper auf der
Erde" (https://www.digitale-sammlungen.de/de/view/bsb10060427?page=392,393) . In
Benzenberg, Johann Friedrich (ed.). Versuche über das Gesetz des Falls, über den Widerstand der
Luft und über die Umdrehung der Erde [Experiments on the Law of falling Bodies, on the Resistance
of Air, and of the Rotation of the Earth]. Dortmund: Gebrüder Mallinckrodt. pp. 363–371.

1813: "Theoria attractionis corporum sphaeroidicorum ellipticorum homogeneorum methodo

nova tractata" (https://gdz.sub.uni-goettingen.de/id/PPN35283028X_0002_2NS?tify=%7B%22pag
es%22%3A%5B318%5D%2C%22pan%22%3A%7B%22x%22%3A0.539%2C%22y%22%3A0.64%7
D%2C%22view%22%3A%22info%22%2C%22zoom%22%3A0.456%7D) . Commentationes
Societatis Regiae Scientiarum Gottingensis Recentiores. Comm. Class. Math. 2: 1–24.

1817: "Ueber die achromatischen Doppelobjective besonders in Rücksicht der vollkommnern

Aufhebung der Farbenzerstreuung" (https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.hxigq8&seq=34
9) [On achromatic double lenses with special regard to a more complete dispersion of colours].
Zeitschrift für Astronomie und verwandte Wissenschaften (in German). IV: 345–351.

1829: "Über ein neues allgemeines Grundgesetz der Mechanik" (https://zenodo.org/record/14488

16) [On a new General Fundamental Law of Mechanics]. Journal für die reine und angewandte
Methematik (Crelle's Journal). 1829 (4): 232–235. 1829. doi:10.1515/crll.1829.4.232 (https://doi.org/
10.1515%2Fcrll.1829.4.232) . S2CID 199545985 (https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:199545
985) .

1832: "Principia generalia theoriae figurae fluidorum fluidorum in statu aequilibrii" (https://gdz.su
b.uni-goettingen.de/id/PPN35283028X_0007_2NS?tify=%7B%22pages%22%3A%5B223%5D%2C%
22view%22%3A%22info%22%7D) . Commentationes Societatis Regiae Scientiarum Gottingensis
Recentiores. 7: 39–88.

1841: "Intensitas vis magneticae terrestris ad mensuram absolutam revocata" (https://gdz.sub.uni-

goettingen.de/id/PPN35283028X_0008_2NS?tify=%7B%22pages%22%3A%5B198%5D%2C%22pa
n%22%3A%7B%22x%22%3A0.569%2C%22y%22%3A0.65%7D%2C%22view%22%3A%22info%22%
2C%22zoom%22%3A0.449%7D) . Commentationes Societatis Regiae Scientiarum Gottingensis
Recentiores. 8: 3–44.
The Intensity of the Earth's Magnetic Force Reduced to Absolute Measurement. (http://21sci-t
ech.com/translations/gaussMagnetic.pdf) Translated by Susan P. Johnson.

1836: H.C. Schumacher (ed.). "Erdmagnetismus und Magnetometer" (https://www.digitale-sammlu

ngen.de/de/view/bsb10538569?page=21) . Jahrbuch für 1836 (in German). Tübingen:
J.G.Cotta'sche Buchhandlung. 1836: 1–47.

1840: Allgemeine Lehrsätze in Beziehung auf die im verkehrten Verhältnis des Quadrats der
Entfernung wirkenden Anziehungs- und Abstoßungskräfte (https://www.deutschestextarchiv.de/boo
k/show/gauss_lehrsaetze_1840) [General Theorems concerning the attractive and repulsive Forces
 acting in reciprocal Proportions of quadratic Distances] (in German). Leipzig: Weidmannsche
Buchhandlung. 1840.

1843: "Dioptrische Untersuchungen" (https://gdz.sub.uni-goettingen.de/id/PPN250442582_0001?t

ify=%7B%22pages%22%3A%5B548%2C549%5D%2C%22view%22%3A%22info%22%7D)
[Dioptrical Investigations]. Abhandlungen der Königlichen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften in
Göttingen (in German). Erster Band: 1–34.
together with Wilhelm Weber

1837–1839: Resultate aus den Beobachtungen des magnetischen Vereins im Jahre 1836–1838 (http
s://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=njp.32101058086446&view=1up&seq=9) (in German).
Göttingen: Dieterichsche Buchhandlung.

1840–1843: Resultate aus den Beobachtungen des magnetischen Vereins im Jahre 1839–1841 (http
s://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=njp.32101058086396&view=1up&seq=199) (in German).
Leipzig: Weidmannsche Verlagsbuchhandlung.

1840: Atlas des Erdmagnetismus nach den Elementen der Theorie entworfen. Supplement zu den
Resultaten aus den Beobachtungen des magnetischen Vereins (https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id
=njp.32101058086388&view=1up&seq=5) (in German). Leipzig: Weidmannsche
Verlagsbuchhandlung.

Collected works
Königlich Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften, ed. (1863–1933). Carl Friedrich Gauss. Werke
(https://gdz.sub.uni-goettingen.de/id/PPN235957348?tify=%7B%22view%22:%22toc%22%7D)
(in Latin and German). Vol. 1–12. Göttingen: (diverse publishers).

Correspondence
Königlich Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften, ed. (1880). Briefwechsel zwischen Gauss und
Bessel (https://archive.org/details/briefwechselzwi00berlgoog/page/n5/mode/2up) (in German).
Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann. (letters from December 1804 to August 1844)

Schoenberg, Erich; Perlick, Alfons (1955). Unbekannte Briefe von C. F. Gauß und Fr. W. Bessel.
Abhandlungen der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Math.-nat. Klasse, Neue Folge, No.
71 (in German). Munich: Verlag der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. pp. 5–21. (letters to
Boguslawski from February 1835 to January 1848)

Schwemin, Friedhelm, ed. (2014). Der Briefwechsel zwischen Carl Friedrich Gauß und Johann Elert
Bode. Acta Historica Astronomica (in German). Vol. 53. Leipzig: Akademische Verlaganstalt.
ISBN 978-3-944913-43-8. (letters from February 1802 to October 1826)
Franz Schmidt, Paul Stäckel, ed. (1899). Briefwechsel zwischen Carl Friedrich Gauss und Wolfgang
Bolyai (https://archive.org/details/briefwechselzwi00gausgoog/page/n4/mode/2up) (in
German). Leipzig: B. G. Teubner. (letters from September 1797 to February 1853; added letters of
other correspondents)

Axel Wittmann, ed. (2018). Obgleich und indeßen. Der Briefwechsel zwischen Carl Friedrich Gauss
und Johann Franz Encke (in German). Remagen: Verlag Kessel. ISBN 978-3945941379. (letters from
June 1810 to June 1854)

Clemens Schaefer, ed. (1927). Briefwechsel zwischen Carl Friedrich Gauss und Christian Ludwig
Gerling (https://gdz.sub.uni-goettingen.de/id/PPN335994989?tify=%7B%22pages%22%3A%5B5%
5D%2C%22view%22%3A%22info%22%7D) (in German). Berlin: Otto Elsner. (letters from June
1810 to June 1854)

Karl Christian Bruhns, ed. (1877). Briefe zwischen A. v. Humboldt und Gauss (https://archive.org/det
ails/briefezwischena00gausgoog/page/n5/mode/2up) (in German). Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann.
(letters from July 1807 to December 1854; added letters of other correspondents)

Reich, Karin; Roussanova, Elena (2018). Karl Kreil und der Erdmagnetismus. Seine Korrespondenz
mit Carl Friedrich Gauß im historischen Kontext. Veröffentlichungen der Kommission für Geschichte
der Naturwissenschaften, Mathematik und Medizin, No. 68 (in German). Vienna: Verlag der
Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. (letters from 1835 to 1843)

Gerardy, Theo, ed. (1959). Briefwechsel zwischen Carl Friedrich Gauß und Carl Ludwig von Lecoq.
Abhandlungen der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Göttingen, Mathematisch-Physikalische
Klasse, No. 4 (in German). Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. pp. 37–63. (letters from February
1799 to September 1800)

Forbes, Eric G. (1971). "The Correspondence between Carl Friedrich Gauss and the Rev. Nevil
Maskelyne (1802-05)" (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00033797100203767) .
Annals of Science. 27 (3): 213–237. doi:10.1080/00033797100203767 (https://doi.org/10.1080%2F0
0033797100203767) .

Carl Schilling, ed. (1900). Briefwechsel zwischen Olbers und Gauss: Erste Abtheilung (https://archive.
org/details/p1wilhelmolberss02olbeuoft/page/n5/mode/2up) . Wilhelm Olbers. Sein Leben und
seine Werke. Zweiter Band (in German). Berlin: Julius Springer. (letters from January 1802 to
October 1819)

Carl Schilling, ed. (1909). Briefwechsel zwischen Olbers und Gauss: Zweite Abtheilung (https://archiv
e.org/details/p2wilhelmolberss02olbeuoft/page/n7/mode/2up) . Wilhelm Olbers. Sein Leben und
seine Werke. Zweiter Band (in German). Berlin: Julius Springer. (letters from January 1820 to May
1839; added letters of other correspondents)
Christian August Friedrich Peters, ed. (1860–1865). Briefwechsel zwischen C. F. Gauss und H. C.
Schumacher (in German). Altona: Gustav Esch.
Volumes 1+2 (https://books.google.com/books?id=aIRtAAAAMAAJ) (letters from April 1808
to March 1836)

Volumes 3+4 (https://books.google.com/books?id=NDcDAAAAQAAJ) (letters from March

1836 to April 1845)

Volumes 5+6 (https://books.google.com/books?id=3jEDAAAAQAAJ) (letters from April

1845 to November 1850)

Poser, Hans, ed. (1987). Briefwechsel zwischen Carl Friedrich Gauß und Eberhard August
Zimmermann. Abhandlungen der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Göttingen, Mathematisch-
Physikalische Klasse, Folge 3, No. 39 (in German). Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. ISBN 978-
3525821169. (letters from 1795 to 1815)
 Title page of Gauss' Title of Theorema Title page of Theoria Title page to the
magnum opus, arithmetici Motus Corporum English Translation of
Disquisitiones demonstratio nova Coelestium in Theoria Motus by
Arithmeticae (1801) (1808) sectionibus conicis Charles Henry Davis
solem ambientium (1857)
(1809)

Title page of Volume II of "Carl

Intensitas vis Friedrich Gauss
Magneticae Terrestris Werke," 1876
ad Mensuram
Absolutam Revocata
(1833)

The Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities provides a complete collection of the yet
known letters from and to Carl Friedrich Gauss that is accessible online.[67] Written estate from Carl
Friedrich Gauss and family members can also be found in the municipal archive of Brunswick.[206]

Names and Commemorations

List of things named after Carl Friedrich Gauss

References

Notes
a. St. Catherine's church

b. The Collegium Carolinum was the preceding institution of the Technische Hochschule Braunschweig, now
Braunschweig Institute of Technology, but at Gauss' time not equal to a university.

c. This error occurs for example in Marsden (1977).[25]

d. On this journey he met the geodesist Ferdinand Rudolph Hassler, who was a scientific correspondent of
Carl Friedrich Gauss.[49][50]

e. Gauss himself, in a letter to Bolyai, complained about "the shallowness that is so dominating in our
contemporary mathematics".[53]

f. The index of correspondence shows that Benjamin Gould was presumably the last correspondent who sent
a letter to Gauss in his lifetime. It was an actual letter of farewell, but it is uncertain whether it reached the
addressee just in time.[67]

g. After his death, a discourse on the perturbations of Pallas in French was found among his papers, probably
as a contribution to a prize competition of the French Academy of Science.[70]

h. Both Gauss and Harding dropped only veiled hints on this personal problem in their correspondence. A
letter to Schumacher indicates that Gauss tried to get rid of his colleague and searched for a new position
for him outside of Göttingen, but without result. Apart from that, Charlotte Waldeck, Gauss' mother-in-law,
pleaded with Olbers to try to provide Gauss with another position far from Göttingen.

i. Bessel never had a university education.

j. The first book he loaned from the university library in 1795 was the novel Clarissa from Samuel
Richardson.[88]

k. The political background was the confusing situation of the German Confederation with 39 nearly
independent states, the sovereigns of three of them being Kings of other countries (Netherlands,
Danmark, United Kingdom), whereas Prussia and Austria extended widely over the frontiers of the
Confederation.

l. Especially entry 146 in his diary is now seen as a prelude to the modern developments associated with
Weil conjectures and the tools of algebraic geometry.[101]

m. In a sense, this result is the analog of the prime number theorem (PNT) for the ring of polynomials. The
PNT is much simpler for polynomials than for integers.
 n. Gauss already dealt implicitly with fundamental domains in his Disquisitions Arithmeticae (1801), in the
context of reduction theory of binary quadratic forms, but this geometric sketch appears for the first time
in his analytic work on the AGM.

o. The unambigeous identification of a cosmic object as planet among the fixed stars requires at least two
observations with interval.

p. Brendel (1929) thought this cipher to be insoluble, but actually decoding was very easy.[125]

q. This article is also noteworthy because it was Gauss's only published reference to his (mostly unpublished)
work on the AGM algorithm.

r. In 1947, Andrey Kolmogorov corrected a mistake he found in Gauss's formula for the lower bound.

s. Lauenburg is in the southernmost place of the Duchy of Holstein, that was held in personal union by the
King of Denmark.

t. This Ramsden sector was loaned by the Board of Ordnance, and had earlier been used by William Mudge
in the Principal Triangulation of Great Britain.[138]

u. The new value of about 1/298.39 what was a significant improvement against the former value of 1/302.78
from Walbeck (1820). The calculation was done by Eduard Schmidt, private lecturer at Göttingen
University.[140]

v. In pp.73-74 of his essay on Gauss's contributions to calculus of variations, Oskar Bolza mentions a
transformation for the expression of geodesic curvature, that Gauss gives at the last section of this
manuscript, which is "the actual core not only of Gauss's theorem about total curvature, but also of
Bonnet's later generalization (1848)".

w. A thunderstorm damaged the cable in 1845.[165]

x. Some authors, such as Joseph J. Rotman, question whether it ever happened.[183]

y. literally translation: Secrete Councillor of the court

Citations
1. Axel D. Wittmann, Inna V. Oreshina (2009). "On Jensen's Paintings of C. F. Gauss" (http://www.gauss-gesell
schaft-goettingen.de/mitteil.html#2009) . Mitteilungen der Gauss-Gesellschaft (46): 57–61.

2. Dudenredaktion; Kleiner, Stefan; Knöbl, Ralf (2015) [First published 1962]. Das Aussprachewörterbuch (http
s://books.google.com/books?id=T6vWCgAAQBAJ) [The Pronunciation Dictionary] (in German) (7th ed.).
Berlin: Dudenverlag. pp. 246, 381, 391. ISBN 978-3-411-04067-4.

3. Krech, Eva-Maria; Stock, Eberhard; Hirschfeld, Ursula; Anders, Lutz Christian (2009). Deutsches
Aussprachewörterbuch (https://books.google.com/books?id=E-1tr_oVkW4C&q=deutsches+aussprachewor
terbuch) [German Pronunciation Dictionary] (in German). Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. pp. 402, 520, 529.
ISBN 978-3-11-018202-6.
 4. Dunnington, Waldo (1927). "The Sesquicentennial of the Birth of Gauss" (https://web.archive.org/web/200
80226020629/http://www.mathsong.com/cfgauss/Dunnington/1927/) . The Scientific Monthly. 24 (5):
402–414. Bibcode:1927SciMo..24..402D (https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1927SciMo..24..402D) .
JSTOR 7912 (https://www.jstor.org/stable/7912) . Archived from the original (http://www.mathsong.com/
cfgauss/Dunnington/1927/) on 26 February 2008. Also available at "T he Sesquicentennial of the Birth of
Gauss" (http://gausschildren.org/genwiki/index.php?title=The_Sesquicentennial_of_the_Birth_of_Gauss) .
Retrieved 23 February 2014. Comprehensive biographical article.

5. Schaaf, William L. (1964). Carl Friedrich Gauss: Prince of Mathematicians (https://archive.org/details/carlfrie

drichgau0000unse) . Franklin Watts.

6. Bell, E.T. (2009). "Ch. 14: The Prince of Mathematicians: Gauss". Men of Mathematics: The Lives and
Achievements of the Great Mathematicians from Zeno to Poincaré. New York: Simon and Schuster. pp. 218–
269. ISBN 978-0-671-46400-4.

7. Heideman·, Michael T.; Johnson, Don H.; Burrus, C. Sydney (1 September 1985). "Gauss and the History of
the Fast Fourier Transform" (https://www.cis.rit.edu/class/simg716/Gauss_History_FFT.pdf) (PDF). Archive
for History of Exact Sciences. 34 (3): 265–277. doi:10.1007/BF00348431 (https://doi.org/10.1007%2FBF0034
8431) .

8. Schaaf, William L. (1964). Carl Friedrich Gauss: Prince of Mathematicians (https://archive.org/details/carlfrie

drichgau0000unse) . Franklin Watts. p. 84.

9. Plackett, R.L. (1972). "The discovery of the method of least squares" (https://hedibert.org/wp-content/uplo
ads/2016/08/plackett1972-thediscoveryofthemethodofleastsquares.pdf) (PDF). Biometrika. 59 (2): 239–
251.

10. Stigler, Stephen M. (1981). "Gauss and the Invention of Least Squares" (https://www.jstor.org/stable/22408
11) . The Annals of Statistics. 9 (3): 465–474. doi:10.1214/aos/1176345451 (https://doi.org/10.1214%2Fao
s%2F1176345451) . ISSN 0090-5364 (https://www.worldcat.org/issn/0090-5364) . JSTOR 2240811 (http
s://www.jstor.org/stable/2240811) .

11. Lim, Milton (31 March 2021). "Gauss, Least Squares, and the Missing Planet" (https://www.actuaries.digital/
2021/03/31/gauss-least-squares-and-the-missing-planet/) . Actuaries Digital. Retrieved 14 October 2023.

12. Klein, Felix (1924). Elementary Mathematics from an Advanced Standpoint: Geometry (https://archive.org/de
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13. Winger, R. M. (1925). "Gauss and non-euclidean geometry" (https://projecteuclid.org/journals/bulletin-of-t

he-american-mathematical-society/volume-31/issue-7/Gauss-and-non-euclidean-geometry/bams/118348
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16. Schaaf, William L. (1964). Carl Friedrich Gauss: Prince of Mathematicians (https://archive.org/details/carlfrie
drichgau0000unse) . Franklin Watts. p. 81.

17. Schaaf, William L. (1964). Carl Friedrich Gauss: Prince of Mathematicians (https://archive.org/details/carlfrie
drichgau0000unse) . Franklin Watts. pp. 115–127.

18. Rudolf Borch (1929) : Ahnentafel des Mathematikers Carl Friedrich Gauß [Genealogical table]. Ahnentafeln
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19. Chamberless, Susan (11 March 2000). "Letter:Worthington, Helen to Carl F. Gauss – 26 July 1911" (http://w
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26) . Susan D. Chamberless. Retrieved 14 September 2011.

20. Dunnington 2004, pp. 398–404.

21. Dunnington 2004, p. 24.

22. Dunnington 2004, p. 26.

23. O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Carl Friedrich Gauss" (https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Bio
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25. Marsden, Brian G. (1 August 1977). "Carl Friedrich Gauss, Astronomer" (http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/197
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27. Dunnington 2004, pp. 50, 54–55, 74–77.

28. Dunnington 2004, pp. 86–87.

29. Brendel 1929, pp. 81–82.

30. Brendel 1929, p. 49.

31. Brendel 1929, p. 83.

32. Brendel 1929, p. 84.

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42. Schweizer, Renate; Wittmann, Axel; Frahm, Jens (2014). "A rare anatomical variation newly identifies the
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3%2Fbrain%2Fawt296) . Brain. 137 (4): e269. doi:10.1093/brain/awt296 (https://doi.org/10.1093%2Fbrai
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4) . Science. New Series. American Association for the Advancement of Science. 9 (229): 697–704.
Bibcode:1899Sci.....9..697C (https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1899Sci.....9..697C) .
doi:10.1126/science.9.229.697 (https://doi.org/10.1126%2Fscience.9.229.697) . JSTOR 1626244 (https://w
ww.jstor.org/stable/1626244) . PMID 17817224 (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17817224) .

46. Dunnington 2004, p. 374.

47. Dunnington 2004, p. 206.

48. Gerardy, Theo (1966). "C. F. Gauß und seine Söhne". Mitteilungen der Gauß-Gesellschaft Göttingen (in
German) (3): 25–35.

49. Gerardy, Theo (1977). "Geodäten als Korrespondenten von Carl Friedrich Gaus". Allgemeine Vermessungs-
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50. Dunnington 2004, p. 286.

51. Wolf, Armin (1964). "Der Pädagoge und Philosoph Johann Conrad Fallenstein (1731–1813) –
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53. Ullrich, Peter (2005). "Herkunft, Schul- und Studienzeit von Carl Friedrich Gauß". In Mittler, Elmar (ed.). "Wie
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g.de/ebook/e/2005/gausscd/html/Katalog.pdf) (PDF). Göttinger Bibliotheksschriften 30.
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55. Klein 1979, p. 5-6.

56. Dunnington 2004, p. 217.

57. Klein, Felix (1894). "The Development of Mathematics at the German Universities" (https://archive.org/deta
ils/lecturesonmathem00klei/page/n108/mode/2up) . Lectures on Mathematics. New York, London:
Macmillan and Co. pp. 99–101. quotation p. 109

58. Letter from Gauss to Bolyai from 2 September 1808 (https://archive.org/details/briefwechselzwi00gausgoo

g/page/n124/mode/2up)

59. Biermann, Kurt-R. (1966). "Über die Beziehungen zwischen C. F. Gauß und F. W. Bessel". Mitteilungen der
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60. Klein 1979, p. 29.

61. Dunnington 2004, p. 420–430.

62. Stigler, Stephen M. (1981). "Gauss and the Invention of Least Squares" (https://projecteuclid.org/journals/a
nnals-of-statistics/volume-9/issue-3/Gauss-and-the-Invention-of-Least-Squares/10.1214/aos/1176345451.
full) . Annals of Statistics. 9 (3): 465–474. doi:10.1214/aos/1176345451 (https://doi.org/10.1214%2Faos%2
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63. Maennchen 1930, p. 4–9.

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65. Maennchen 1930, p. 3.

66. Dunnington 2004, p. 405–410.

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71. Brendel 1929, pp. 7, 128.

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73. Mackinnon, Nick (1990). "Sophie Germain, or, Was Gauss a feminist?". The Mathematical Gazette. The
Mathematical Association. 74 (470): 346–351. doi:10.2307/3618130 (https://doi.org/10.2307%2F361813
0) . JSTOR 3618130 (https://www.jstor.org/stable/3618130) . S2CID 126102577 (https://api.semanticscho
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74. Dunnington 2004, p. 195-200.

75. Dunnington 2004, p. 288.

76. Sartorius von Waltershausen 1856, p. 102.

77. Sartorius von Waltershausen 1856, p. 95.

78. Sartorius von Waltershausen 1856, p. 8.

79. Sartorius von Waltershausen 1856, p. 68.

80. Sartorius von Waltershausen 1856, p. 100.

81. Wußing 1982, p. 41.

82. "Letter from Carl Friedrich Gauss to Johanna Gauss, 23. October 1809" (https://gauss.adw-goe.de/handle/g
auss/2086) . Der komplette Briefwechsel von Carl Friedrich Gauss. Akademie der Wissenschaften zu
Göttingen. 23 October 1809. Retrieved 26 March 2023.

83. Dunnington 2004, pp. 94–95.

84. Dunnington 2004, p. 206, 374.

85. "Letter: Charles Henry Gauss to Florian Cajori – 21 December 1898" (https://homepages.rootsweb.com/~sc
hmblss/home/Letters/Gauss/1898-12-21.htm) . Retrieved 25 March 2023.

86. Sartorius von Waltershausen 1856, p. 71.

87. Lehfeldt, Werner (2005). "Carl Friedrich Gauß' Beschäftigung mit der russischen Sprache". In Mittler, Elmar
(ed.). "Wie der Blitz einschlägt, hat sich das Räthsel gelöst" – Carl Friedrich Gauß in Göttingen (http://webdo
c.sub.gwdg.de/ebook/e/2005/gausscd/html/Katalog.pdf) (PDF). Göttinger Bibliotheksschriften 30.
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89. Wußing 1982, p. 80.

90. Wußing 1982, p. 81.

91. Sartorius von Waltershausen 1856, p. 94.

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Bühler, Walter Kaufmann (1981). Gauss: A Biographical Study (https://books.google.com/books?id=ktruAAAA

MAAJ) . Springer-Verlag. ISBN 978-0-387-10662-5.

Dunnington, G. Waldo (2004). Carl Friedrich Gauss: Titan of Science (https://books.google.com/books?id=4m

wSrfxBSzkC) . The Mathematical Association of America. ISBN 978-0-88385-547-8. OCLC 53933110
(https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/53933110) . First edition: Carl Friedrich Gauss: Titan of Science. A
Study of his Life and Work. New York: Exposition Press. 1955.
Gray, Jeremy (1955). "Introduction to Dunnington's "Gauss" ". Carl Friedrich Gauss: Titan of Science. A
Study of his Life and Work. New York: Exposition Press. pp. xix–xxvi. With a critical view on
Dunnington's style and appraisals

Galle, Andreas (1924). "Über die geodätischen Arbeiten von Gauss" (https://gdz.sub.uni-goettingen.de/id/PP
N236059505?tify=%7B%22pages%22%3A%5B7%5D%2C%22view%22%3A%22info%22%7D) . In
Königlich Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften (ed.). Carl Friedrich Gauss. Werke (in German).
Vol. XI, 2.

Geppert, Harald (1933). "Über Gauss' Arbeiten zur Mechanik und Potentialtheorie" (https://gdz.sub.uni-goetti
ngen.de/id/PPN236019856?tify=%7B%22pages%22%3A%5B635%5D%2C%22pan%22%3A%7B%22x%
22%3A0.506%2C%22y%22%3A0.4%7D%2C%22view%22%3A%22info%22%2C%22zoom%22%3A0.7
3%7D) . In Königlich Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften (ed.). Carl Friedrich Gauss. Werke (in
German). Vol. X, 2 (Abhandlung 7).
 Klein, Felix (1979) [1926]. Vorlesungen über die Entwicklung der Mathematik im 19. Jahrhundert. Teil 1 (https://
gdz.sub.uni-goettingen.de/id/PPN375425993) [Lectures on the Development of Mathematics in the
19th Century]. Grundlehren der mathematischen Wissenschaften 24 (in German). Berlin, Heidelberg,
New York: Springer-Verlag. ISBN 3-540-09234-X.

Maennchen, Philipp (1930). "Gauss als Zahlenrechner" (https://gdz.sub.uni-goettingen.de/id/PPN236019856?t

ify=%7B%22pages%22%3A%5B555%5D%2C%22pan%22%3A%7B%22x%22%3A0.127%2C%22y%22%
3A0.73%7D%2C%22view%22%3A%22info%22%2C%22zoom%22%3A0.38%7D) . In Königlich
Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften (ed.). Carl Friedrich Gauss. Werke (in German). Vol. X, 2
(Abhandlung 6).

Sartorius von Waltershausen, Wolfgang (1856). Gauss zum Gedächtniss (https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_h_

Q5AAAAcAAJ/page/n4/mode/1up) (in German). S. Hirzel.
Carl Friedrich Gauss. A Memorial (https://ia600405.us.archive.org/20/items/gaussmemorial00walt/gauss
memorial00walt.pdf) (PDF). Translated by Helen Worthington Gauss. Colorado Springs. 1966.

Schaefer, Clemens (1929). "Über Gauss' physikalische Arbeiten" (https://gdz.sub.uni-goettingen.de/id/PPN236

059505?tify=%7B%22pages%22%3A%5B176%2C177%5D%2C%22view%22%3A%22info%22%7D) .
In Königlich Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften (ed.). Carl Friedrich Gauss. Werke (in German).
Vol. XI, 2 (Abhandlung 2).

Schlesinger, Ludwig (1933). "Über Gauss' Arbeiten zur Funktionentheorie" (https://gdz.sub.uni-goettingen.de/

id/PPN236019856?tify=%7B%22pages%22%3A%5B85%5D%2C%22view%22%3A%22info%22%7D) .
In Königlich Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften (ed.). Carl Friedrich Gauss. Werke (in German).
Vol. X, 2.

Wußing, Hans (1982). Carl Friedrich Gauß (in German) (4 ed.). Leipzig: BSB B. G. Teubner.

Further reading
Merzbach, Uta C.; Boyer, Carl B. (2011). A History of Mathematics (https://books.google.com/books?id=bR9H
AAAAQBAJ) (3rd ed.). New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 978-0470630563.

Hall, Tord (1970). Carl Friedrich Gauss: A Biography (https://archive.org/details/carlfriedrichgau00tord) .

Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-08040-8. OCLC 185662235 (https://www.worldcat.org/ocl
c/185662235) .

Nahin, Paul J. (2010). An Imaginary Tale: The Story of √-1 (https://books.google.com/books?id=OPyPwaElDvU

C&pg=PA82) . Princeton University Press. ISBN 9 78-1-4008-3389-4.

Simmons, J. (1996). The Giant Book of Scientists: The 100 Greatest Minds of All Time. Sydney: The Book
Company.

Tent, Margaret (2006). The Prince of Mathematics: Carl Friedrich Gauss. A. K. Peters. ISBN 978-1-56881-455-1.
fictional

Kehlmann, Daniel (2005). Die Vermessung der Welt (in German). Rowohlt. ISBN 978-3-498-03528-0.
OCLC 144590801 (https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/144590801) .
Gauss, Carl Friedrich (2006). Measuring the World. Translated by Janeway, Carol Brown.

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Publications of C. F. Gauss (http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-abs_connect?db_key=AST&db_key=PRE&

qform=AST&arxiv_sel=astro-ph&arxiv_sel=cond-mat&arxiv_sel=cs&arxiv_sel=gr-qc&arxiv_sel=hep-e
x&arxiv_sel=hep-lat&arxiv_sel=hep-ph&arxiv_sel=hep-th&arxiv_sel=math&arxiv_sel=math-ph&arxiv_
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o&sim_query=YES&ned_query=YES&adsobj_query=YES&aut_logic=OR&obj_logic=OR&author=Gaus
s%0D%0AGau%C3%9F&object=&start_mon=&start_year=&end_mon=12&end_year=1965&ttl_logic
=OR&title=&txt_logic=OR&text=&nr_to_return=200&start_nr=1&jou_pick=ALL&ref_stems=&data_a
nd=ALL&group_and=ALL&start_entry_day=&start_entry_mon=&start_entry_year=&end_entry_day=&
end_entry_mon=&end_entry_year=&min_score=&sort=SCORE&data_type=SHORT&aut_syn=YES&ttl_
syn=YES&txt_syn=YES&aut_wt=1.0&obj_wt=1.0&ttl_wt=0.3&txt_wt=3.0&aut_wgt=YES&obj_wgt=YES
&ttl_wgt=YES&txt_wgt=YES&ttl_sco=YES&txt_sco=YES&version=1) in Astrophysics Data System
"Obituary" (http://adsabs.harvard.edu//full/seri/MNRAS/0016//0000080.000.html) . Monthly Notices of the
Royal Astronomical Society. 16 (80). 1856.

O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Carl Friedrich Gauss" (https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biogra
phies/Gauss.html) , MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive, University of St Andrews

"Carl Friedrich Gauss" (https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00ss0lf) . BBC 4. A Brief History of

Mathematics.

Grimes, James. "5050 And a Gauss Trick" (https://archive.today/20130411122756/http://www.numberphile.co

m/videos/one_to_million.html) . Numberphile. Brady Haran. Archived from the original (http://www.n
umberphile.com/videos/one_to_million.html) on 11 April 2013.

"Carl Friedrich Gauß" (https://www.uni-goettingen.de/en/62596.html) . Göttingen University.

"Gauss" (http://www.gausschildren.org/cfgauss/cfgauss.htm) . www.gausschildren.org.

Carl Friedrich Gauss – Spuren seines Lebens (https://denkmalatlas.niedersachsen.de/viewer/themen/Gauss-Stei

ne/) (Places used as points for triangulation)

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