Maths is the latest to receive the Google Doodle homage.
Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss, otherwise known as "The Prince of Mathematicians", made instrumental contributions to number theory, algebra, geophysics, mechanics and statistics.
Gauss was born on April 30 in 1777 in Brunswick, a city in the north of Germany, near Wolfsburg. Despite poor working-class parents and an illiterate mother, Gauss was a child prodigy, believed to have been able to add up every number from 1 to 100 at 8-years-old.
One of his first major equations was working out his date of birth, which his mother hadn't recorded. He used the only information she had: that it was a Wednesday, eight days before an Easter holiday.
At university when he was 19, Gauss discovered a heptadecagon, or a 17-sided polygon. He requested that a regular heptadecagon be inscribed on his tombstone, but it was too difficult for the stonemason, who said it would just look like a circle.
A heptadecagon.
László Németh/WikipediaAnd remember your prime numbers? That year Gauss was involved with proving the prime number theorem, helping understand how prime numbers are distributed among the integers, or whole numbers.
Again the same year, a productive one for Gauss, he discovered the quadratic reciprocity law, which allows mathematicians to determine the solvability of any quadratic equation in modular arithmetic.
At 24, Gauss' work on number theory, which he completed when he was 21, was published as a textbook. Not only did it involve his original work, but it reconciled that of other mathematicians. It would be considered his magnum opus and had an extraordinary impact on the field.
Oh, and add to those achievements a discovery in astronomy -- in the same year, 1801, Gauss calculated the orbit of an asteroid called Ceres.
After a much-accomplished life, Gauss died aged 77 on Feb. 23, 1855.
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