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Gauß, Johann Carl Friedrich

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Encyclopedia of Continuum Mechanics
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Johann Carl Friedrich Gauß (April 30, 1777, in Brunswick, Principality of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel; February 23, 1855, in Göttingen, Kingdom of Hanover, German Confederation) was a mathematician and physicist with exceptional influence in many fields of mathematics and science (he is ranked among history’s most influential mathematicians).

Johann Carl Friedrich Gauß

Early Years and Education

Johann Carl Friedrich Gauß was the only one child of Gebhard Dietrich Gauß (1744–1808) and Dorothea Gauß nee Bentze (1743–1839). He attended the primary school in the age of 7 years. When he was 9 years old, his teacher Büttner formulated the problem to compute the sum of the numbers from 1 to 100. Gauß solved this problem very quick using the following algorithm: the sum is equal to 50 pairs with the sum 101 (1 + 100, 2 + 99, …, 50 + 51) and yields 5050. The teacher understood that Gauß had a great talent in mathematics. Finally, Gauß could attend in 1788 the Katharineum allowing to obtain a higher...

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Correspondence to Holm Altenbach .

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Altenbach, H. (2019). Gauß, Johann Carl Friedrich. In: Altenbach, H., Öchsner, A. (eds) Encyclopedia of Continuum Mechanics. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-53605-6_114-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-53605-6_114-1

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