Carl Friedrich Gauß (1777–1855), the Prince of Mathematicians, was the latest, after Archimedes and Newton, in this trio of great men whose ideas shaped mathematics for centuries after their work (and two of whom figure prominently in this book).

Born on April 30, 1777, and registered as Johann Friderich Carl Gauß, he grew up in a poor bricklayer's family in Braunschweig. His father, an honest but tough and simple-minded person, did not succeed in keeping his son as uneducated as himself, mainly because of the efforts of Gauß' mother Dorothea and his uncle Friederich.

Gauß loved to tell the story of how—at ten years of age—one of the first flashes of his genius surprised his unsuspecting teacher Büttner. The class had been given the task to sum the numbers 1,…,100. (What a useless task!) Gauß figured out the corresponding summation formula (see Section 23.1), wrote down the correct answer almost immediately, and waited while the other boys took the full hour to get their answers—all wrong. (Such stupidities have not vanished from German schools: the first author had a high-school geography teacher who would set similarly useless tasks in order to have some time for serious study— of the current Playboy issue.)