The book traces Carl Friedrich Gauss’s life from his working-class boyhood to the height of European mathematics. Tent’s book is based on extensive research of original and secondary sources – stories Gauss had told himself, from the vignettes and the conversations that had come down to us.

His fascination with numbers started early, which showcased his intuitive brain: asking his mother and his uncle, questions and by learning to count in the process, a three-year-old Gauss correcting his father’s arithmetic mistake in paying the workers, and surprising his class teacher in coming up with the correct answer to the sum of first 100 counting numbers at the age of ten.

The dumbfounded mathematical teacher assigned Gauss more advanced arithmetic text, and soon it became apparent that Gauss had already figured out all the concepts of the class text book, and needed something advanced.

Finally, it came to the mathematics teacher....