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.
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 young 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.
IN this book we have sought to give an account of a department of mathematics which is now generally regarded as fundamental. A list of the men to whom the successive advances of the subject are due, includes, with few exceptions, the names of the greatest French and German mathematicians of the century, from Cauchy and Gauss onward. And in line with these advances lie the chief fields of mathematical activity at the present day.
