Carl Gauss

Carl Gauss

Carl Gauss was known as the prince of mathematics. He excelled in arithmetic at a very early age. For example, he was able to correct his parents math by the time he was three years old, at twelve he began to question the axioms of Euclid and at the age of nineteen he proved that the regular n-gon (ex: octagon, pentagon, nonigon)  was constructible only when it is the product of distinct prime Fermat numbers. And finally at the age of twenty-four he published Disquisitiones Arithmeticae.

"It is not knowledge, but the act of learning, ... 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 ..." - Carl Gauss

Carl Gauss was known as a "theorem prover."  He was first to show proof of Euclid's Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic (that every natural number has a unique expression as product of primes); and first to show proof of the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra (that an n-th degree polynomial has n complex roots). Gauss proved the n=3 case of Fermat's Last Theorem for a class of complex integers. He also did things like:  Fundamental Theorems in Statistics, Vector Analysis, Function Theory, and generalizations of the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus.

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