Carl Friedrich GAUSS(1777-1855),
If looking in on Carl Gauss' life you would say it was pretty normal.
Even though he was brought up in a limited childhood with a poor and uneducated family he showed out-of-the-ordinary intelligence. When he received a stipend from the duke of Brunswick at the age of 14 it allowed him to devote his time to his studies for 16 plus years. By the time his 25th birthday came around, he was already famous for his work in mathematics and astronomy. In contrast to his outside appearance, Gauss' personal life was very tragic and complicated. Because of the French Revolution, Napoleon period, and the democratic revolutions in Germany, he suffered from political grief and financial insecurity. He found very few mathematical peers and worked alone for most of his life. With a very stern and unsympathetic father, the early death of his first wife, the poor health of his second wife, and terrible relations with his sons Gauss was denied of a close family life until later in his life.
Title page of Gauss's Disquisitiones Arithmeticae
Oil painting of Carl Friedrich Gauss by G. Bierman...
English: Carl Friedrich Gauss on his deathbad, 185...Carl Friedrich Gauss was a german mathematican, noted for his wide-ranging contributions to mathematics, including the number theory, analysis, differential geometry, geodesy, and electromagnetism. Gauss was born in Braunschweig, Germany on April 1777. When Gauss attempted to solve the classical problem of constructing a regular heptagon, or seven-sided figure, with ruler and compass he didn't only succeed in proving that this construction was impossible, but he went on to give methods of constructing figures with 17, 257 and 65, 537 sides. In doing so he proved that the construction, with compass and ruler, of a regular polygon with an odd number of sides was not possible only when the number of sides was a prime number of the series (3, 5, 17, 257, and 65,