Early Life | Carl Friedrich Gauss |1777-1855
This is the second post in what I call “Early Life” series in which I bring excerpts from the biographies of scientists who left a profound mark in the history of science. How they lived, how they were educated, what was special in their lives, what motivated them – these are some of the questions that I would like to have an answer to. Will some pattern of behavior emerge from their stories, as told through these excerpts? Let’s find out.
”As long as he lived Gauss cherished memories of the narrow little homecircle of his childhood. In old age he liked to recall characteristic little episodes which reflected the outwardly restricted, modest homelife, but in which one detected the sparks of genius which later rose to such heights. He remembered these incidents accurately and in recounting them he never varied the details. His amused and cheerful telling gave them a delightful charm which would be lost were they to be repeated in print.
[…]
While still very young Gauss showed rare mental gifts. He learned to read by asking one or another in the home the sound of the letters. His marked aptitude for numbers and his ease and accuracy in mental arithmetic soon attracted the attention of his parents and their friends. He used to say jestingly that he learned to count before he could talk. Gauss' father carried on in the summer a masonry business. On Saturday evenings it was his habit to pay his workmen their past week's wages, paying those who had worked overtime according to the extra hours they had put in. On one such occasion he had finished the reckoning and was about to pay out the money when there came a childish voice from a small bed in the corner of the room. Unnoticed the three-year old child had been following his father's transactions. Now he said, "Father, the reckoning is wrong. It is so much," naming a certain figure. The reckoning was gone over again and was found to be what the child had said.
In 1784 after his seventh birthday the little fellow entered the public school where elementary subjects were taught and which was then under a man named Büttner. It was a drab, low school-room with a worn, uneven floor. On one side one looked out on the two slender Gothic towers of the Catharinen Church, on the other side were stables and poor back-yard dwellings. Here among some hundred pupils Büttner went back and forth, in his hand the switch which was then accepted by everyone as the final argument of the teacher. As occasion warranted he used it. In this school, which seems to have followed very much the pattern of the Middle Ages, the young Gauss remained two years without special incident. By that time he had reached the arithmetic class in which most boys remained up to their fifteenth year. Here occurred an incident which he often related in old age with amusement and relish. In this class the pupil who first finished his example in arithmetic was to place his slate in the middle of a large table. On top of this the second placed his slate and so on. The young Gauss had just entered the class when Büttner gave out for a problem the adding of a series of numbers from 1 to 100. The problem was barely stated before Gauss threw his slate on the table with the words (in the low Braunschweig dialect): "There it lies." While the other pupils continued busily adding, Büttner, with conscious dignity, walked back and forth, occasionally throwing an ironical, pitying glance toward this the youngest of the pupils. The boy sat quietly with his task ended, as fully aware as he always was on finishing a task that the problem had been correctly solved and that there could be no other result. At the end df the hour the slates were turned bottom up. That of the young Gauss with one solitary figure lay on top. When Büttner read out the answer, to the surprise of all present that of young Gauss was found to be correct, whereas many of the others were wrong. Büttner now decided to write to Hamburg for a new book on arithmetic which would be better suited to the young lad's exceptional mind. But before long he is said to have had enough insight to declare that Gauss could learn nothing more in his school. Assisting Büttner at the time was a young man by the name of Bartels whose task it was to assist the younger boys with the cutting of their quill pens and with their writing. Since he also was interested in mathematics a close friendship developed between him and the 10-year old Gauss which later had importance for the life work of both. Bartels was able to procure some useful books on mathematics which the two young people studied together. Gauss thus became fully acquainted with the Binomial Theorem in complete generality and soon thereafter with the Theory of Infinite Numbers which opened the way for him into Higher Analysis.”
Excerpted from Gauss by Wolfgang Sartorius von Waltershausen/Publication date 1856. The book is available to read at https://archive.org/details/gauss00waltgoog
According to Wikipedia ”Wolfgang Sartorius Freiherr von Waltershausen (December 17, 1809 – March 16, 1876) was a German geologist. […] Waltershausen was also the author of Gauss zum Gedächtnis, in 1856. This biography, published upon the death of Carl Friedrich Gauss, is viewed as Gauss's biography as Gauss wished it to be told.”
Image Source Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons
About the artist
“Christian Albrecht Jensen (26 June 1792 – 13 July 1870) was a Danish portrait painter who was active during the Golden Age of Danish Painting in the first half of the 19th century.
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By the Pulkovo Observatory, which opened near Saint Petersburg, he was commissioned to paint 11 portraits of leading international scientists. His painting of Carl Friedrich Gauss from that series remains the most famous portrait of the mathematician.”
