His Education And Childhood!

Carl was born on April 30, 1777. His Mother was illterate and didnt record his birthdate but Gauss knew that he was born 8 days before the Feast of Ascension (39 days after Easter), After he found out what day was Easter on. Later on he was confirmed in a church by a school he went to. He was called a child prodigy. When he was 8 he figued out how to add up all the numbers 1-100. He made his first groundbreaking mathmatical discoveries as a teenager. He also completed his magnum opus, Disquisitiones Arithmeticae, in 1798 when he was 21 but didnt get published untill 1801.

Gauss's intellectual abilities attracted the attention of the Duke of Brunswick,  who sent him to the Collegium Carolinum (now Braunschweig University of Technology), which he attended from 1792 to 1795, and to the University of Göttingen from 1795 to 1798. While at university, Gauss independently rediscovered several important theorems.  His breakthrough occurred in 1796 when he showed that a regular polygon can be constructed by compass and straightedge if the number of its sides is the product of distinct Fermat primes and a power of 2. 

Gauss was so pleased with this result that he requested that a regular heptadecagon be inscribed on his tombstone. The stonemason declined, stating that the difficult construction would essentially look like a circle.  This was a major discovery in an important field of mathematics; construction problems had occupied mathematicians since the days of the Ancient Greeks, and the discovery ultimately led Gauss to choose mathematics instead of philology as a career.

His Contributions!

He proved the Fermat polygonal number therom for n=3: In additive number theory, the Fermat polygonal number theorem states that every positive integer is a sum of at most n-gonal numbers. He also proved the Fermats last theroem for n=5: In number theory, Fermat's Last Theorem states that no three positive integers a, b, and c satisfy the equation an + bn = cn for any integer value of n greater than 2.

Lastly he proved Descartes' rule of signs. It is a technique for determining an upper bound on the number of positive or negative real roots of a polynomial. It is not a complete criterion, because it does not provide the exact number of positive or negative roots.

Famous Quotes & More Information!