Carl Friedrich Gauss: Mathematical Prodigy

Aprodigy is a highly talented child, usually called precocious or gifted, and almost always ahead of his peers.The German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855) was one such child. He often boasted that he could calculate before he could speak. By the ripe old age of three, before he had been taught any arithmetic, he corrected his father’s payroll by declaring “the reckoning is wrong.” A further check of the numbers proved young Carl correct.

As a ten-year-old student, Gauss was presented the following mathematical problem:What is the sum of numbers from 1 to 100? While his fellow students were frantically calculating with paper and pencil, Gauss immediately envisioned that if he spread out the numbers 1 through 50 from left to right, and the numbers 51 to 100 from right to left directly below the 1–50 numbers, each combination would add up to 101 (1 100, 2 99, 3 98, . . .). Since there were fifty sums, the answer would be 101 50 5050.To the astonishment of everyone, including the teacher, young Carl got the answer not only ahead of everyone else, but computed it entirely in his mind. He wrote out the answer on his slate, and flung it on the teacher’s desk with a defiant “There it lies.” The teacher was so impressed that he invested his own money to purchase the best available textbook on arithmetic and gave it to Gauss, stating, “He is beyond me, I can teach him nothing more.”

Indeed, Gauss became the mathematics teacher of others, and eventually went on to become one of the greatest mathematicians in history, his theories still used today in the service of science. Gauss’s desire to better understand Nature through the language of mathematics was summed up in his motto, taken from Shakespeare’s King Lear (substituting “laws” for “law”):“Thou, nature, art my goddess; to thy laws/My services are bound.”


Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss (30 April 1777 – 23 February 1855) was a German mathematician and scientist who contributed significantly to many fields, including number theory, analysis, differential geometry, geodesy, electrostatics, astronomy, and optics. Sometimes known as "the prince of mathematicians" and "greatest mathematician since antiquity", Gauss had a remarkable influence in many fields of mathematics and science and is ranked as one of history's  most influential mathematicians.