Carl Friedrich Gauss

In Our Time: Science

BBC

History

4.5 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 30 November 2017

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In a programme first broadcast in 2017, Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Gauss (1777-1855), widely viewed as one of the greatest mathematicians of all time. He was a child prodigy, correcting his father's accounts before he was 3, dumbfounding his teachers with the speed of his mental arithmetic, and gaining a wealthy patron who supported his education. He wrote on number theory when he was 21, with his Disquisitiones Arithmeticae, which has influenced developments since. Among his achievements, he was the first to work out how to make a 17-sided polygon, he predicted the orbit of the minor planet Ceres, rediscovering it, he found a way of sending signals along a wire, using electromagnetism, the first electromagnetic telegraph, and he advanced the understanding of parallel lines on curved surfaces. With Marcus du Sautoy Professor of Mathematics and Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford Colva Roney-Dougal Reader in Pure Mathematics at the University of St Andrews And Nick Evans Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Southampton Producer: Simon Tillotson.

Transcript

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0:44.4	Hello Carl Friedrich Gauss by those who know about these matters is considered the
0:49.0	greatest mathematician of his time and arguably of all time. He was born in 1777 in Brunswick, Germany to
0:55.4	parents too poor to pay for his education but his brilliance brought him a royal
0:59.8	patron and sponsor and as a teenager he sold problems that had baffled everyone since the ancient Greeks.
1:06.2	By the time he died in 1855 he'd been called the Prince of Mathematicians for advances in
1:11.1	number theory for predicting where to find asteroids, for thinking beyond
1:15.0	Euclid, geometry and on the way inventing the first telegraph. Later his importance to the mathematical
1:20.3	foundations of the theory of relativity was overwhelming as Einstein
1:24.0	acknowledged. With me to discuss Gause are Marcus Yersoy
	...

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