25/07/2019 Gauss - 19th Century Mathematics - The Story of Mathematics

The Story of Mathematics 19TH CENTURY MATHEMATICS - GAUSS

Prehistoric Mathematics Carl Friedrich Gauss is sometimes referred to as the "Prince of
Sumerian/Babylonian Mathematicians" and the "greatest mathematician since antiquity". He has
Mathematics had a remarkable influence in many fields of mathematics and science and
Egyptian Mathematics is ranked as one of history's most influential mathematicians.
Greek Mathematics
Hellenistic Mathematics Gauss was a child prodigy. There are many anecdotes concerning his
Roman Mathematics precocity as a child, and he made his first ground-breaking mathematical
Mayan Mathematics discoveries while still a teenager.
Chinese Mathematics
At just three years old, he corrected an error in his father payroll
Indian Mathematics
calculations, and he was looking after his father’s accounts on a regular
Islamic Mathematics
basis by the age of 5. At the age of 7, he is reported to have amazed his
Medieval European Mathematics
teachers by summing the integers from 1 to 100 almost instantly (having
16th Century Mathematics
quickly spotted that the sum was actually 50 pairs of numbers, with each
17th Century Mathematics
pair summing to 101, total 5,050). By the age of 12, he was already
18th Century Mathematics
attending gymnasium and criticizing Euclid’s geometry.
19th Century Mathematics
Galois Although his family was poor and working class, Gauss' intellectual
Gauss abilities attracted the attention of the Duke of Brunswick, who sent him to Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855)
Bolyai and Lobachevsky the Collegium Carolinum at 15, and then to the prestigious University of
Riemann Göttingen (which he attended from 1795 to 1798). It was as a teenager attending university that Gauss
Boole discovered (or independently rediscovered) several important theorems.
Cantor
Poincaré At 15, Gauss was the first to find any
20th Century Mathematics kind of a pattern in the occurrence of
prime numbers, a problem which had
exercised the minds of the best
List of Important Mathematicians mathematicians since ancient times.
Although the occurrence of prime
Glossary of Mathematical Terms numbers appeared to be almost
competely random, Gauss approached
Sources the problem from a different angle by
graphing the incidence of primes as the
Contact numbers increased. He noticed a rough
pattern or trend: as the numbers
increased by 10, the probability of prime
numbers occurring reduced by a factor
of about 2 (e.g. there is a 1 in 4 chance
of getting a prime in the number from 1
to 100, a 1 in 6 chance of a prime in the
numbers from 1 to 1,000, a 1 in 8 Graphs of the density of prime numbers
chance from 1 to 10,000, 1 in 10 from 1
to 100,000, etc). However, he was quite aware that his method merely yielded an approximation and, as he
could not definitively prove his findings, and kept them secret until much later in life.

In Gauss’s annus mirabilis of 1796, at

just 19 years of age, he constructed a
hitherto unknown regular seventeen-
sided figure using only a ruler and
compass, a major advance in this field
since the time of Greek mathematics,
formulated his prime number theorem
on the distribution of prime numbers
among the integers, and proved that
every positive integer is representable
as a sum of at most three triangular
numbers.

Although he made contributions in

almost all fields of mathematics, 17-sided heptadecagon constructed by Gauss
number theory was always Gauss’
favourite area, and he asserted that “mathematics is the queen of the sciences, and the theory of numbers is
the queen of mathematics”. An example of how Gauss revolutionized number theory can be seen in his work
with complex numbers (combinations of real and imaginary numbers).

Gauss gave the first clear exposition of

complex numbers and of the

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25/07/2019 Gauss - 19th Century Mathematics - The Story of Mathematics
investigation of functions of complex
variables in the early 19th Century.
Although imaginary numbers involving i
(the imaginary unit, equal to the square
root of -1) had been used since as early
as the 16th Century to solve equations
that could not be solved in any other
way, and despite Euler’s ground-
breaking work on imaginary and
complex numbers in the 18th Century,
there was still no clear picture of how
imaginary numbers connected with real
numbers until the early 19th Century.
Gauss was not the first to intepret
complex numbers graphically (Jean-
Robert Argand produced his Argand
diagrams in 1806, and the Dane Caspar
Wessel had described similar ideas
even before the turn of the century), but
Representation of complex numbers
Gauss was certainly responsible for
popularizing the practice and also formally introduced the standard notation a + bi for complex numbers. As a
result, the theory of complex numbers received a notable expansion, and its full potential began to be
unleashed.

At the age of just 22, he proved what is now known as the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra (although it was
not really about algebra). The theorem states that every non-constant single-variable polynomial over the
complex numbers has at least one root (although his initial proof was not rigorous, he improved on it later in
life). What it also showed was that the field of complex numbers is algebraically "closed" (unlike real numbers,
where the solution to a polynomial with real co-efficients can yield a solution in the complex number field).

Then, in 1801, at 24 years of age, he published his book “Disquisitiones Arithmeticae”, which is regarded
today as one of the most influential mathematics books ever written, and which laid the foundations for
modern number theory. Among many other things, the book contained a clear presentation of Gauss’ method
of modular arithmetic, and the first proof of the law of quadratic reciprocity (first conjectured by Euler and
Legendre).

For much of his life, Gauss also

retained a strong interest in theoretical
astrononomy, and he held the post of
Director of the astronomical observatory
in Göttingen for many years. When the
planetoid Ceres was in the process of
being identified in the late 17th Century,
Gauss made a prediction of its position
which varied greatly from the
predictions of most other astronomers
of the time. But, when Ceres was finally
discovered in 1801, it was almost
exacly where Gauss had predicted.
Although he did not explain his methods
at the time, this was one of the first
applications of the least squares
approximation method, usually
attributed to Gauss, although also
claimed by the Frenchman Legendre.
Gauss claimed to have done the
logarithmic calculations in his head.

As Gauss’ fame spread, though, and he

became known throughout Europe as
the go-to man for complex
mathematical questions, his character
deteriorated and he became Line of best fit by Gauss’ least squares method
increasingly arrogant, bitter, dismissive
and unpleasant, rather than just shy. There are many stories of the way in which Gauss had dismissed the
ideas of young mathematicians or, in some cases, claimed them as his own.

In the area of probability and statistics,

Gauss introduced what is now known
as Gaussian distribution, the Gaussian
function and the Gaussian error curve.
He showed how probability could be
represented by a bell-shaped or
“normal” curve, which peaks around the
mean or expected value and quickly
falls off towards plus/minus infinity,
which is basic to descriptions of
statistically distributed data.

He also made ths first systematic study

of modular arithmetic - using integer
division and the modulus - which now
has applications in number theory,
abstract algebra, computer science,
cryptography, and even in visual and
musical art.

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25/07/2019 Gauss - 19th Century Mathematics - The Story of Mathematics
While engaged on a rather banal
surveying job for the Royal House of
Hanover in the years after 1818, Gauss
was also looking into the shape of the
Earth, and starting to speculate on
revolutionary ideas like shape of space
itself. This led him to question one of
the central tenets of the whole of
mathematics, Euclidean geometry,
which was clearly premised on a flat,
and not a curved, universe. He later
claimed to have considered a non-
Euclidean geometry (in which Euclid's
parallel axiom, for example, does not
apply), which was internally consistent
and free of contradiction, as early as
1800. Unwilling to court controversy,
however, Gauss decided not to pursue
or publish any of his avant-garde ideas
in this area, leaving the field open to
Bolyai and Lobachevsky, although he is
still considered by some to be a pioneer
of non-Euclidean geometry.
Gaussian, or normal, probability curve
The Hanover survey work also fuelled
Gauss' interest in differential geometry
(a field of mathematics dealing with
curves and surfaces) and what has
come to be known as Gaussian
curvature (an intrinsic measure of
curvature, dependent only on how
distances are measured on the surface,
not on the way it is embedded in
space). All in all, despite the rather
pedestrian nature of his employment,
the responsibilities of caring for his sick
mother and the constant arguments
with his wife Minna (who desperately
wanted to move to Berlin), this was a
very fruitful period of his academic life,
and he published over 70 papers
between 1820 and 1830.

Gauss’ achievements were not limited

to pure mathematics, however. During
his surveying years, he invented the
heliotrope, an instrument that uses a
mirror to reflect sunlight over great
distances to mark positions in a land
survey. In later years, he collaborated Gaussian curvature
with Wilhelm Weber on measurements
of the Earth's magnetic field, and invented the first electric telegraph. In recognition of his contributions to the
theory of electromagnetism, the international unit of magnetic induction is known as the gauss.

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