Gauss beat Cooley and Tukey to the fast Fourier transform by 160 years
A bricklayer's son from Brunswick, Carl Friedrich Gauss devised the fast Fourier transform, named non-Euclidean geometry and co-built an electromagnetic telegraph, yet let much of it sit unpublished. He would only print polished results, so rivals and successors kept rediscovering what he already knew, sometimes generations later.
Gauss was born in 1777 into a family of modest standing; his father worked at various times as a butcher, bricklayer and gardener. Teachers who spotted his talent brought him to the Duke of Brunswick, who paid for his schooling and then for university at Göttingen. The famous tale of him adding the numbers 1 to 100 in moments, by pairing them into fifty sums of 101, is probably apocryphal, and the trick itself appears in a 12th-century Talmud commentary. What is certain is that at 19 he showed which regular polygons can be drawn with compass and straightedge, including the 17-sided one, the first advance on that problem in over 2,000 years. That result settled his choice of mathematics over philology.
His 1801 Disquisitiones Arithmeticae reshaped number theory and introduced the triple-bar sign for congruence. Then he turned to the sky: his work on the orbits of small bodies helped establish Ceres, produced the Gaussian gravitational constant, and gave the method of least squares, which he had found before Legendre published it. The Duke's death in battle at Jena in 1806 cut off his funding, and in 1807 he became professor and observatory director at Göttingen, a post he held until he died in 1855.
His interests moved by decades: astronomy first, then surveying the Kingdom of Hanover, then magnetism. In 1832 he became the first to measure the strength of Earth's magnetic field in absolute terms and showed most of it originates inside the planet. His practical side produced the heliotrope surveying instrument, a magnetometer, and with Wilhelm Weber an electromagnetic telegraph in 1833.
He disliked lecturing and popularising, wrote no textbook and published only in Latin or German. Even so, his students included Dedekind and Riemann. He believed the greatest pleasure came from learning rather than from owning knowledge, and much of his work reached the world only when others edited it after his death.
Source: Carl Friedrich Gauss
