Post by Tony Thompson

Happy belated (April 30) birthday to Carl Friedrich Gauss, one of the greatest mathematicians of all time. (Many rank Gauss as the greatest, but in my humble opinion, that title belongs to Leonhard Euler.) Of Gauss, British mathematician John Stephen Smith stated: "If we except the great name of Newton it is probable that no mathematicians of any age or country have ever surpassed Gauss in the combination of an abundant fertility of invention with an absolute rigorousness in demonstration, which the ancient Greeks themselves might have envied." But for my money, Gauss's greatest achievement was the formulation of Gauss's law, one of Maxwell's four field equations for electromagnetism. (There is some dispute as to whether this formulation was made by Gauss first or by Lagrange first. In any event, the law is named after Gauss.) Were the universe not to obey Gauss's law, life as we know it would not exist. We certainly would not have the phenomena of light. Whether you believe Gauss a great mathematician, or a great physicist, there can be no doubt that Gauss has had a great impact on our lives.