Carl Friedrich Gauss was called the "Prince of Mathematics" and is considered, alongside Euler, the greatest mathematician who ever lived. He made foundational contributions to number theory, statistics, algebra, astronomy, and physics. But he also had a maddening habit of keeping his discoveries to himself — sitting on results for years or decades, publishing late or not at all, and leaving other mathematicians to rediscover what he had already proven in his private notebooks.
This episode traces Gauss from his prodigy childhood in Brunswick through the Disquisitiones Arithmeticae that revolutionized number theory, the astronomical calculations that made him famous, and the unpublished notebooks that revealed how much more he had discovered than anyone knew.
Gauss's legendary childhood — correcting his father's arithmetic at age three, summing 1 to 100 instantly
The Disquisitiones Arithmeticae and the proof of the fundamental theorem of algebra at twenty-one
The prediction of Ceres's orbit that made him Europe's most famous scientist
The unpublished notebooks — non-Euclidean geometry, complex analysis, and the discoveries he hid
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