Carl Friedrich Gauss, spoken in the same breath as Euclid and Newton, came from a family of farmers and labourers.
According to his own story, his mother could not remember his exact date of birth but knew it was on a Wednesday eight days before Ascension. Gauss calculated and later came up with a formula by which one can calculate the day Easter falls in any year, and found his birth date to be April 30, 1777.
The mathematical prodigy was giving signs of brilliance from an early age: When five years old, he found an error in his father’s payroll. One day Gauss’s class was challenged by Buttner, the mathematics teacher, to find the sum of all the integer numbers from 1 to 100.
He wrote 5050, as the answer and the reason if he paired off the integers, he would have 50 pairs of integers, and because the 50 pairs added to 101, he multiplied 101 by 50 to get the total.
Noticing his potential Buttner....
