694 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



SKETCH OF CARL FRIEDRICH GAUSS. 



' ' T"F we except the great name of Newton," says Prof. H. J. S. 



J- Smith, " it is probable that no mathematician of any age 

 or country has ever surpassed Gauss in the combination of an 

 abundant fertility in invention with an absolute rigorousness in 

 demonstration which the ancient Greeks themselves might have 

 envied." Wagener says, in the sketch of Gauss in the " Biogra- 

 phie Universelle," that each work of his is an event in the his- 

 tory of science, a revolution, which, overturning the old theories 

 and methods, replaces them by new ones, and advances science to 

 a height which no one had ever before dreamed of. The scientific 

 estimate of Gauss's quality took another form in the expression 

 of Laplace, who, when asked who was the greatest mathematician 

 in Germany, replied " Pfaff." His interrogator remarking that he 

 should have thought Gauss was, Laplace retorted, " Oh, yes, Pf aff 

 is the greatest mathematician in Germany, but Gauss is the great- 

 est mathematician in Europe." 



Cael Friedrich Gauss was born in Brunswick, April 23, 

 1777, and died in Gottingen, February 23, 1855. His father was a 

 brick-layer, and desired that the boy should be brought up to the 

 same trade. But the lad had other tastes, and is said by some of his 

 biographers to have displayed a greater precocity in his aptitude 

 for mathematics than even Pascal. At three years old he could 

 calculate and solve problems in numbers, and amuse himself by 

 tracing geometrical lines and figures in the sand. He had, in fact, 

 hardly reached that age when he ventured to tell his father concern- 

 ing a certain account, " That is not right ; it should be so much " 

 — and was correct. At the age of ten he was acquainted with the 

 binomial theorem and theory of the infinite series. Such gifts 

 could not fail to attract marked attention from his teachers. The 

 report of them reached Bartels, afterward Professor of Mathemat- 

 ics at Dorpat, and he brought the youth to the notice of Charles 

 "William, Duke of Brunswick, who undertook the charge of his 

 education. Having, rather in opposition to his father's designs, 

 learned all that the professors at the Collegium Carolinum could 

 teach him, he went to Gottingen, in 1795, " as yet undecided 

 whether to pursue philology or mathematics." The scale was 

 probably turned by circumstances ; one of them, perhaps, being the 

 rare gifts of the mathematical professor, Kaestner, whom Gauss 

 described as the " first of geometers among poets, and the first of 

 poets among geometers " ; and another, his success in solving the 

 problem of the division of the circle into seventeen equal parts. 

 Henceforth he made mathematics, which he styled " the queen of 

 the sciences," the main study of his life, interesting himself par- 



