Book Description
This biography of Gauss, by far the most comprehensive in English, is the work of a professor of German, G. Waldo Dunnington, who devoted most of his scholarly career to studying the life of Germany's greatest mathematician. The author was inspired to pursue this project at the age of twelve when he learned from his teacher in Missouri that no full biography of Gauss existed at the time. His teacher was Gauss's great granddaughter, Minna Waldeck Gauss. Long out of print and almost impossible to find on the used book market, this valuable piece of scholarship is being reissued in an augmented form with introductory remarks, an expanded and updated bibliography, and a commentary on Gauss's mathematical diary, by the eminent British mathematical historian, Jeremy Gray. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Good for the Math/Science History Nerd
This book is a very dry and scholarly biography of Gauss. It shows an incredible amount of research on the part of the author and includes pretty much anything you would want to know about Gauss. It also includes a large number of letters that he sent and received which is a very nice touch. Despite most of it being fairly dry it does include some very fun stories. You will defiantly have a "favorite Gauss story" when you finish reading this book.
The author does an exceptional job on his researcher and his book contains a wealth of knowledge. All of the information is portrayed well, but without any type of personal flair. The book is well organized if one where using it for research purposes. However, if you plan to pick this up and read it cover to cover the chronology of his life is sometimes hard to grasp.
Overall this is definitely the best biography there is on one of the most important scientist of the early 19th century. I would recommend it if you are truly interested in the topic. I myself enjoy much more talking about what I learned from this book than actually reading it.

The best book available on the life of Gauss
Being an aficianado of the history of mathematics and science I did not hesitate to buy this book; and I would recommend it to anyone who loves stories about mathematicians. But it is much more of a (dry) 'unmathematical' biography than I expected. The author has done an amazing amount of research---the book is teeming with anectdotal stories about people related to Gauss and is filled with references to source material. This is certainly a book I enjoy 'having read' more than I enjoyed reading.

At last - a reprint !!
Thank goodness this excellent book has finally been reprinted. This book has been my primary source for research information on the early life of Gauss, and provides a lot of really useful information on this fascinating genius. I have ordered this book as I myself am writing a book which details how some of Gauss' ideas have influenced modern life.

By the way - MATHSINGER - if you read this; I have taken the liberty of adding you to my Amazon friends list - if you would like to correspond with me about your illustrious progenitor I would be delighted. Any insight into this fascinating individual and giant of science would be most helpful in the preparation of my own book...

Finally Republished !!
I am so glad to see this book back in print.I am a great great great granddaughter of Gauss and have been referring people to this book for the last several years, always knowing it was hard to find.It is my primary reference for Gauss, and much of it is very readable.It addresses Gauss' personal life, as well as his mathmatics, and the original edition has short biographies of Gauss' children, and a genealogy. ... Read more

Product Description
The author narrates the life of Carl Friedrich Gauss, the 18th century mathematician, from his prodigious childhood to his extraordinary achievements that earned him the title "Prince of Mathematics". Along the way, the author introduces her readers to a different culture, the era of small states in Germany where advancement on merits, such as Gauss’, was supported by enlightened rulers, competing for intellectual excellence and economic advantage through scientific progress in their small states.Based on extensive research of original and secondary sources, the author has created an historical narrative that will inspire young readers and even curious adults with a story full of human touch and personal achievement. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Great high level overview of Gauss's Life
This was a great overview of Gauss's life and career.I have an engineering background and used Gauss's mathematics during my college days and engineering work.This book was written so that one could read and appreciate it with a very limited understanding of algebra and trigonometry.I knew very little about Gauss's life before reading this text, and I am happy with what I learned about him.

This book gave several brief examples of how Gauss thought about math problems as a young man.For example, the author describes several mathematical problems that Gauss solved in a very unique way compared to his peers (e.g. quickly finding the sum of all integers from 1 to 100).The book contains descriptions of how a young Gauss approached and thought about his unique solutions.

Several areas of Gauss's expertise were only briefly described (e.g. his work on magnetism).I would have liked to have had more technical detail included as an appendix to the text.

Prince of Math
This is a perfect book for a teenager even if she or he is not a math fan; well-written, always interesting.

A C Tort

An in-depth and intricate story of the amazing life of a revolutionary mathematician
The Prince Of Mathematics: Carl Friedrich Gauss, knowledgeably and engagingly written by mathematics teacher M. B. W. Tent, is an in-depth and intricate story of the amazing life of a revolutionary mathematician. Based upon stories told by Gauss, The Prince Of Mathematics reveals an intimate and vivid account of an 18th century's mathematician's life. The Prince Of Mathematics is an accurate and true understanding of a man who in his time was a prolific contributor to the science of mathematics. For its educational and informative content, The Prince Of Mathematics is very highly recommended reading to all mathematics history enthusiasts, as well as those in study of cultural paradigm oriented biographical study.

Wonderful portrait
This book is great for all ages. It tells the life of Gauss while explaining his mathmatical concepts at the same time. The words are understandable for all ages and it is wonderful that somone researched his life. Tent explains his life in an entertaining manner that allows the reader to really realize his journey in life. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Good Intro to Gauss, But Math Types Will Want More Bio Info
There are two audiences for this book.The first would be those steeped in math, who know the math of Gauss but not the man.The second would be those, like me, who have heard of the man but know little of his work or life.

This book may be thin fodder for the first.Like many intellectual giants, there was little externally interesting in Gauss' life.His most vigorous physical activities were geodesic surveys in the summer and astronomical observations.But the mind, the thoughts ...

Gauss, in the eyes of Hall, was the third greatest mathematician of all time, behind only Archimedes and Isaac Newton.The range of his scientific and mathematical accomplishments is great:plotting Ceres' orbit -- the first time that was ever done for an asteroid; pinning the Earth's magnetic field as originating in its interior; introducing the statistical concepts of Gaussian (nomal) distribution, error curves, and the least square fitting of data; establishing non-Euclidean geometry; conducting geodesic surveys; pioneering work on elliptic functions and hypergeometric series.Hall briefly puts these accomplishments in the greater context of scientific and mathematical history

But his protean intellect didn't stop with math.He originally was interested in becoming a philologist and read Russian, Danish, classical Greek and Latin, and English (and was a fan of Sir Walter Scott).He also put his stastical and actuarial knowledge to practical use in investing.Besides student fees, he only earned 1,000 thalers a year as a professor but died with an estate worth 153,000 thaler.

As for the life of Gauss, we meet a child prodigy from a very humble background, estranged from a father whose coldness he would emulate towards his own sons.Duke Ferdinand of Braunschweig, was the royal patron who lifted him out of his common existence and encouraged him.The Duke's death, from wounds sustained fighting Napoleon at the Battle of Auerstadt, made Gauss a lifetime political conservative.A blissful first marriage too soon ended with his wife's death.Two of his six children emmigrated to Missouri and did well for themselves.One son, Eugene, always had strained relations with his father but was closest to possessing his gifts in languages and math.He could do elaborate calculations in his head and remember long figures well enough to catch them incorrectly dictated to him.He also helped compose a dictionary of a Sioux language for use by missionaries.

The words Hall uses most often to describe Gauss' personality are "Olympian" and "cold".His personal motto seems to have been "Few But Ripe." when publishing his mathematical discoveries.He only considered a mathematical proposition finished when he could present in full form without the "scaffolding" showing of how he arrived at it.He also wanted his work to be of general significance, and he also didn't want to argue his ideas with intellectual inferiors.A consequence of this was that several mathematicians were credited with first proposing ideas that were later shown, in his notebooks, to have been discovered earlier by Gauss.It was disconcerting for other mathematicians who wrote him of some new theorem or proof they had developed to have him write back that their ideas followed some he had already had, sometimes followed by a comment that they had saved him the work of polishing his ideas.This was not idle boasting.Gauss didn't lie.However, in the case of Johann Bolyai, son of a mathematician friend of Gauss and developer of hyperbolic geometry, this lead to a strained relationship.When Gauss became aware of Bolyai's invention of a non-Euclidean geometry, he didn't praise the work because it followed his own discoveries of 30 years before.Gauss could not resolve the conflict of wanting to preserve the priority of his own work and yet also wanting to praise important work done independently.

The legacy of his mathematical work -- as well as his physical studies -- is secure.No less than Albert Einstein said that, without Gauss, there would have been no theory of relativity.

A good introduction to the signficance of Gauss and his work, but those who already know his work will no doubt want more about the man.

Gauss is really cool!
Carl Friedrich Gauss is undisputed one of the greatest mathematicians of all time. This book provides personal information as well as mathematical explainations of work (including geodesy, celestial orbits, non-Euclideangeometry, etc.). How did one person make so many mathematical advancements?Amazing! ... Read more

Book Description
English translation of standard mathematical work on theory of numbers, first published in Latin in 1801. "Among the greatest mathematical treatises of all fields and periods."--Asger Aaboe. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (7)

understandable to all
What blows my mind about Gauss's Disquisitiones is that it is understandable to people like me who don't have an advanced background in mathematics. You just need to move through it slowly and carefully. There is a certain joy that comes along with making the discoveries that Gauss walks you through. A book that will change your outlook on life by enhancing what you see as the basic philosophy underlying numbers and mathematics. Mathemtical magicians like Euler and Lagrange will just confuse and dazzle you with their tricks, but Gauss will give you understanding.

Martin Christensen"s Review
This book is very good, but not quite excellent. Gauss spent, in my opinion, too much time on the theory of binary forms and too little on the general second-degree equation in two variables that the theory is such a big part of. However, the rest of the book was first-rate, well suited to one of the greatest mathematicians of all time. I considered it money well spent.

Choose your edition carefully
This is a great book.It's the place where modern number theory begins.It's also well enough written that it's enjoyable to read today.

There are two editions and you have to choose carefully.I don't know whether my review will appear on both editions or just one.The softcover is only $47.The hardcover is $129, but it is a REVISED translation.A single person, who does not seem to be have been a mathematician, made the first translation from Latin in 1965.That was revised by a team of 4 scholars in 1986.

That turns out to be important, because the original translator got a few things wrong, like the logic of a double negative.So there are some places where the first (cheaper, softcover, Yale) edition is either wrong or unclear.Many of these problems have been fixed in the second (more expensive, hardcover, Springer-Verlag) edition.

I bought the first edition and I have no regrets, but you will get extra value for your extra money if you buy the second edition.

Not bad for 204 years old.
Gauss wrote Disquisitiones between 1795 and 1801. If I can read and understand Clarke's translation in less time than it took Gauss to write the original, I will be doing well. The mathematics has not been superseded and the historical aspect is extremely valuable.

Professor
It is the best book for people who takes mathematics seriously ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Important work
This very technical and archaic book is a rather strange book to keep in print. Its entire purpose is the determination of the orbits of heavenly bodies on the basis of limited observations. This was prompted by the discovery of Ceres, which was sighted briefly in 1801 and then lost. For the regular planets one of course has enormous amounts of observational data for determining the orbit, but we are now facing a new problem: to determine the orbit from only a few observations. By Kepler's laws we know that the orbit will be an ellipse and once we know the ellipse we know its orbital period (by the harmonic law, R^2 proportional to period^3). Therefore, to know the position of Ceres at all future times we need to determine the ellipse and the position of Ceres at one given time. A conic has five degrees of freedom (Ax^2+Bxy+Cy^2+Dx+Ey+1=0) and the position at a given time gives one additional degree of freedom, so we should need 6 pieces of data to determine the future positions of Ceres. Each observation gives 2 data (coordinates on celestial sphere), so three observations should be enough to solve the problem and indeed Gauss provides such a solution. To get the most out of the data, Gauss uses the method of least squares and makes careful error estimates and so on. Towards the end of the book Gauss addresses the issue of perturbations. Gauss's prediction of the position of Ceres was a stunning success, but his method does not work as well for Pallas, discovered in 1802, since its orbit cannot be taken to be a perfect ellipse because it is too heavily perturbed by Jupiter and other planets.

Yes!It's back in print!
The lovely Lady is missing!She's been spotted three times. And the hero, the best and brightest of young Men, goes looking for Her!There is no time to lose.Will she be found by New Year's Day?What an adventure story!

Well, actually, this is a book about mathematics and celestial mechanics.And it isn't exactly new: it was written in 1809.

But this isn't just a history book.Nor is it nearly impossible to read, like Newton's Principia.This is the exciting tale, in great mathematical detail, of the techniques that enabled Gauss to find Ceres.And how the same methods can be used to find Juno and Pallas given three observations of them, or Vesta given two complete and two incomplete observations.

For those who don't know this, Ceres was discovered by Giuseppe Piazzi, a 40-year old mathematics professor, on January 1, 1801.Piazzi observed Ceres twenty more times, the final time on February 11.After that, Ceres was lost.In the September, 1801 issue of the Monatliche Correspondenz, Piazzi published his entire set of observations of Ceres.Karl Gauss, then 24 years old, took only a few weeks to predict the path of Ceres, in surprisingly good agreement with modern values.He sent his results to Franz von Zach, the editor of the Monatliche Correspondenz.On December 31, 1801, von Zach unambiguously confirmed the recovery of Ceres.

This book has not aged well, of course.Gauss, one of the greatest mathematicians ever, was forced to do his calculations without the aid of modern computers.And so we see plenty ofmathematical tricks that we can all appreciate, but for the most part are unnecessary today (and we can be glad that we rarely need to employ them ourselves).

Still, if you want to understand orbital mechanics, this is a remarkably good book to read.It is surprisingly easy to follow all the math, and once you've read it, you'll be able to solve plenty of orbital mechanics problems.

And if you ever want to solve some really tough problems in orbital mechanics, Gauss is a great teacher.You'll gain valuable insight about what approximations are available and when to make them. ... Read more

Book Description
In the 1820s Gauss published two memoirs on least squares, which contain his final, definitive treatment of the area along with a wealth of material on probability, statistics, numerical analysis, and geodesy. These memoirs, originally published in Latin with German Notices, have been inaccessible to the English-speaking community. Here for the first time they are collected in an English translation. For scholars interested in comparisons the book includes the original text and the English translation on facing pages. More generally the book will be of interest to statisticians, numerical analysts, and other scientists who are interested in what Gauss did and how he set about doing it. An Afterword by the translator, G. W. Stewart, places Gauss's contributions in historical perspective. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

This valuable book makes Gauss's work available in English.
This book is a new English translation of Gauss's profound andpractical work on the Method of Least Squares for readers whosereading ability of Latin is limited (who can read Latin nowadays?). It is fascinating to read Gauss's original work, which is striking in its originality and depth.

G.W. Stewart has done an excellent job for the most part.The English translation is easy to follow and flows naturally.However, Mr. Stewart has engaged in some idiosyncratic choices.For example, he insists on translating "valor maxime plausible" as "most reliable value" rather than the obvious "most plausible value" commonly used both in English and German (by Gauss himself, I might add).He digresses in his Afterword about Laplace's "chutzpa" (what is that about?).At one point he says that a certain proof is "Gauss at his grimmest--a forced march from hypothesis to conclusion..." Isn't all of mathematical proof a steady progression in a beeline toward the Q.E.D.?

The low-water mark of Stewart's gratuitous insults to Gauss is his parting shot: the final sentence of his Afterword, and of the whole book.He says, "What is certain is that Gauss can be as enigmatic to us as he was to his contemporaries." How he can justify this hatchet job is hard to imagine, since any fair-minded reader of this book will be astonished at the clarity of Gauss's thought and exposition.

It is supremely unfortunate that the editors at SIAM chose a translator, skilled though he is, who has a personal antipathy toward one of the great mathematical minds of all history.In spite of the injustices done to him in this volume, Gauss's thinking and achievements shine through, and quite simply dwarf those of his small-minded translator. ... Read more

Book Description
An Unabridged Printing Of The Morehead And Hiltebeitel Translation, With Bibliography And An Introduction By H. D. Thompson, Professor Of Mathematics, Princeton University - ... Read more

Product Description
In this volume are included all of Gauss's number-theoretic works: his masterpiece, Disquisitiones Arithmeticae, published when Gauss was only 25 years old; several papers published during the ensuing 31 years; and papers taken from material found in Gauss's handwriting after his death. These papers include a fourth, fifth, and sixth proof of the Quadratic Reciprocity Law, researches on biquadratic residues, quadratic forms, and other topics. This reprint of the German translation from Latin of the second edition published in 1889 includes an extensive appendix and concludes with a commentary on the papers (with references, where appropriate, to the relevant pages of the Disquisitiones). ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A beautiful little book
This is a delightful slim volume giving a complete picture of one of the most important mathematicians of all time.The biographical information is accurate and clear, the organization is easy to follow, the translationinto English is good, and the illustrations are magnificent and plentiful.

The summaries of Gauss' work are clear to any reader who is tuned intomathematics in general, and Gauss the man comes across as eccentric butbasically good and definitely productive. ... Read more