Carl Friedrich Gauss
Carl Friedrich Gauss
Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss; Latin: Carolus Fridericus Gauss)was a German mathematician who contributed significantly to many fields, including number theory, algebra, statistics, analysis, differential geometry, geodesy, geophysics, mechanics, electrostatics, astronomy, matrix theory, and optics...
NationalityGerman
ProfessionMathematician
Date of Birth30 April 1777
CountryGermany
use infinite mathematics
I protest against the use of infinite magnitude ..., which is never permissible in mathematics.
truth philosopher corny
When a philosopher says something that is true then it is trivial. When he says something that is not trivial then it is false.
views roots squares
That this subject [of imaginary magnitudes] has hitherto been considered from the wrong point of view and surrounded by a mysterious obscurity, is to be attributed largely to an ill-adapted notation. If, for example, +1, -1, and the square root of -1 had been called direct, inverse and lateral units, instead of positive, negative and imaginary (or even impossible), such an obscurity would have been out of the question.
mathematics relation concerned
Mathematics is concerned only with the enumeration and comparison of relations.
mathematics controversy
In mathematics there are no true controversies.
discovery woods violet
Mathematical discoveries, like springtime violets in the woods, have their season which no human can hasten or retard.
past years meditation
To praise it would amount to praising myself. For the entire content of the work... coincides almost exactly with my own meditations which have occupied my mind for the past thirty or thirty-five years.
numbers jewels scales
The total number of Dirichlet's publications is not large: jewels are not weighed on a grocery scale.
ideas tables calculations
You have no idea, how much poetry there is in the calculation of a table of logarithms!
infinite
The Infinite is only a manner of speaking.
success two effort
Finally, two days ago, I succeeded - not on account of my hard efforts, but by the grace of the Lord. Like a sudden flash of lightning, the riddle was solved. I am unable to say what was the conducting thread that connected what I previously knew with what made my success possible.
law demand scientist
By explanation the scientist understands nothing except the reduction to the least and simplest basic laws possible, beyond which he cannot go, but must plainly demand them; from them however he deduces the phenomena absolutely completely as necessary.
one-direction two goal
In the last two months I have been very busy with my own mathematical speculations, which have cost me much time, without my having reached my original goal. Again and again I was enticed by the frequently interesting prospects from one direction to the other, sometimes even by will-o'-the-wisps, as is not rare in mathematic speculations.
work littles mathematical
A reply to Olbers' attempt in 1816 to entice him to work on Fermat's Theorem. I confess that Fermat's Theorem as an isolated proposition has very little interest for me, because I could easily lay down a multitude of such propositions, which one could neither prove nor dispose of. []