Rensselaer Union, Volume 9, Number 35, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 May 1877 — A Mathematician. [ARTICLE]

A Mathematician.

Tuk Town of Brunswick was to celebrate on Monday last the hundredth anniversary of fee birthday of Gauss, the great German mathematician. Carl Friedrich Gauss was fee son of a bricklayer, and it was his father’s wish that the boy should be a bricklayer too. But the lad was another Pascal, had a marvelous aptitude for calculation, and used jokingly to say in later years that he could reckon before bb could talk. When scarcely three years old he pointed out the inaccuracy of an account. When thirty he was appointed Professor of Astronomy at Gottingen, and is said never afterward to hare slept from under fee roof of his own observatory but on one occasion, and to have seen a locomotive for fee first time only a year before his death, which took place Feb. 28, 1855. His lectures were exceedingly clear expositions. In them he liked to discuss fee methods and the roads by which he arrived at hie great results. He required the closest attention, and objected to fee taking of notes lest his bearers should lose the thread ot hie argument. The students, seated around fee lecture-table, listened wife delight to the lucid and most animated addresses of their master—addresses mote lesembling conversations than lectures. “ The chief figure in this group,” says one of his biographers, “ stands before us, wife clear, bngnt eyes, fee right eyebrow raised high er than fee left, a forehead high and wide, overhung with gray locks, and a countenance whose variations were all expressive of the great mind within.” He was a man of determined character and strong will, and exhibited a curious mixtare of self-conscious dignity and childlike simplicity. He knew several languages, was well acquainted wife English authors, and on one occasion was immensely amused with a passage in one of HirWalter Scott’s novels: “The moon rises broad in fee northwest.” By unanimous consent he has been ranked with Archimedes and Newton, as one of fee three greatest mathematicians feat ever lived.—JV. Y. Tribune.