Johann Friedrich Carl Gauss

You now have ten seconds to sum all the positive integers from one to hundred, go! Not so easy, right? Well, a calculating child prodigy, German mathematician Johann Friedrich Carl Gauss, generally regarded as one of the greatest mathematicians of all time, carried upon this task within seconds, at age 7, promptly identifying that the sum was 50 pairs of numbers each pair summing to 101, totaling to 5050. He made crucial contributions to geometry, statistics, number theory, planetary astronomy, the theory of functions, potential theory, optics, and geophysics. Born on the 30th of April, 1777, in Brunswick, Germany to a very poor family, the father of Carl Friedrich Gauss was a gardener and builder, his mother devoted to his son's education. Gauss was a child prodigy in mathematics. The Duke of Brunswick was very impressed with his intellectual skills when he was only 14, so his stay at the Brunswick Collegium Carolinum, Hanover was financially supported.

There, Gauss self-sufficiently discovered Bode's law, the Binomial Theorem and the Arithmetic- Geometric Mean, the Law of Quadratic Reciprocity, and the Prime Number Theorem.