Early Life | Carl Friedrich Gauss |1777-1855
“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.”
Early Life | Joseph Fourier |1768-1830)
Fourier was born at Auxerre on the 21st of March, 1768. His father, like that of the illustrious geometer Lambert, was a tailor. This circumstance would formerly have occupied a large place in the éloge of our learned colleague; thanks to the progress of enlightened ideas, I may mention the circumstance as a fact of no importance: nobody, in effect, thinks in the present day, nobody even pretends to think, that genius is the privilege of rank or fortune.