The German mathematician often called the Prince of Mathematicians, who reshaped number theory, geometry, astronomy, and the science of measurement. Born poor in Brunswick in 1777, Gauss published the 'Disquisitiones Arithmeticae' at twenty-four, computed where the newly discovered Ceres would reappear, gave least squares a powerful theoretical foundation by linking it to the normal error curve, and worked out results he kept private for years under his motto 'few, but ripe' — including a non-Euclidean geometry whose mathematics of curvature, through Riemann, later gave relativity its language. His name still marks the bell curve, a unit of magnetism, and the shape of curved space.
In 1801, astronomers found a new world between Mars and Jupiter, watched it for forty-one nights, then lost it in the glare of the Sun. They had no way to predict where it would reappear. A twenty-four-year-old in Brunswick took their handful of observations and, with a new method of his own, computed the hidden orbit. When telescopes turned to the spot he named, the asteroid Ceres was there. The young man was Carl Friedrich Gauss, and finding a lost planet by pure calculation made him famous across Europe. It was not even his deepest work.