Carl Friedrich Gauss

A timeline of Gauss' life and accomplishments

• 1777 - Born in Brunswick in the Duchy of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel (now Germany)
• 1782 - Started at St. Katherine's Public School
• 1787 - By age 10 Gauss had independently derived the binomial theorem
• 1788 - Funded by the Duke of Brunswick, Gauss began at Martino-Katherineum grammar school, excelling in Mathematics, Ancient Greek, Latin, and Modern Languages
• 1792 - 1795 - Earned a degree in mathematics at Caroline College
• 1795 - 1798 - Earned a doctorate at the University of Göttengen
• 1796 - This was big year of discovery for Gauss
  • Discovered a mathematical formula to find all the regular polygons that can be constructed by compass and straight edge alone
  • Started keeping a diary of his discoveries. This diary contained over 146 discoveries and was lost for over 40 years after Gauss' death. The year 1796 contained 49 entries
  • Became the first to prove the quadratic reciprocity law
  • Conjectured the prime number theorem
  • Discovered that every positive integer is the sum of at most three triangular numbers
• 1801 - Published Disquisitiones Arithmeticae (Latin for Arithmetic Investigations) - considered one of the greatest works in the history of mathematics and where modern number theory begins. In it Gauss produced formal proofs of many of his earlier discoveries
• 1801 - Calculated the location of the dwarf planet Ceres which had been discovered and lost a year before. Astronomers could not find it with only three degrees of previously tracked locations (less than 1% of Ceres' orbit). For this achievement, Gauss received international fame
• 1805 - Married first wife Johanna Osthoff
• 1806 - Lost financial support with the death of the Duke of Brunswick
• 1806 - Birth of first child Joseph
• 1807 - Accepted the Chair of Astronomy at Göttengen, which Gauss held for the rest of his life. Gauss chose this position mainly because it required minimal undergraduate teaching
• 1808 - Birth of second child Wilhelmina
• 1809 - Published Theoria motus corporum coelestium in sectionibus conicis solem ambientum (Theory of motion of the celestial bodies moving in conic sections around the Sun) which streamlined the mathematics of orbital prediction
• 1809 - Birth of third child Louis. Lost first wife Johanna a month after the birth of Louis
• 1810 - Lost son Louis. Gauss fell into a depression from which he never fully recovered
• 1810 - Remarried to Johanna's best friend Friederica Wilhelmine Waldeck, commonly known as Minna,
• 1811 - Birth of fourth child Eugene
• 1813 - Birth of fifth child Wilhelm
• 1816 - Birth of sixth child Therese
• 1817 - Gauss' mother came to live in his house
• 1818 - Carried out a geodesic survey of the Kingdom of Hanover
• 1821 - To aid his surveying, Gauss invented the heliotrope, a mirror that reflects the sun's rays over long distances to measure positions. Heliotropes were used in Germany and the USA for over 150 years
• 1821 - Made a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences
• 1822 - Elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• 1828 - Gauss' survey of Hanover led to his Theorema Egregium (remarkable theorem) which states that the curvature of a surface can be determined entirely by measuring angles and distances on the surface
• 1831 - Developed a collaboration with physics professor Wilhelm Weber, leading to new knowledge in magenetism
• 1831 - Gauss' second wife Minna died after a long illness. Gauss youngest daughter Therese took over the household and cared for Gauss until he died
• 1832 - János Bolyai published work on the discovery of non-Euclidean geometry. Gauss claimed to have discovered the possiblity years before but would not publish it because it would cause controversy. Gauss did not want to spend the time explaining the discovery which was a major paradigm shift in mathemathics
• 1832 - Gauss' son Eugene left for America after having a dispute. Eugene shared a talent for languages and computation, but Gauss wanted Eugene to become a lawyer. Gauss believed if Eugene followed in his footsteps, it would diminish the family name
• 1833 - Gauss and Weber constructed the first electromagnetic telegraph which connected the observatory with the physics institute in Göttengen
• 1835 - Used mathematics to analyze the behavior of electric and magnetic fields. Formulated two laws: Gauss's Law and Guass's Law for Magnetism. These laws form part of the basis for studying electromagnetism
• 1837 - Wilhelm, Gauss' youngest son, also moved to America and settled in Missouri
• 1839 - Gauss' mother died at the age of 97
• 1840 - Published Dioptrische Untersuchungen (Dioptric Investigations) in which he gave the first systematic analysis on the formation of images under a paraxial approximation (Gaussian optics)
• 1845 - Became associated member of the Royal Institute of the Netherlands
• 1855 - Died in Göttingen in the Kindom of Hanover (now Germany) at the age of 77. His brain was preserved and stored in Göttengen's physiology department where it still exists today

"If Gauss had published all of his discoveries in a timely manner, he would have advanced mathematics by fifty years"

For more about this interesting man of mathematics, read about him on Famous Scientists or read his Wikipedia entry.