Carl Friedrich Gauss

Carl Friedrich Gauss was born in Brunswick, Germany, to a poor family; his father was a laborer and his mother could not read. A famous story says that as a schoolboy he quickly added the numbers from one to a hundred by pairing them. The Duke of Brunswick paid for his education. At nineteen he showed how to construct a regular seventeen-sided polygon with only a compass and straightedge, a problem unsolved since ancient times, and he asked that the figure be carved on his tomb. In 1801, at twenty-four, he published Disquisitiones Arithmeticae, which laid the foundations of modern number theory. That same year he calculated the orbit of the newly discovered dwarf planet Ceres, allowing astronomers to find it again after it disappeared behind the Sun. He became director of the observatory at Göttingen, where he stayed for the rest of his life. He also worked on surveying, the shape of the Earth, magnetism, and with Wilhelm Weber built an early electric telegraph. He published only what he considered perfect. He died in Göttingen in 1855.

Faith: A member of the Lutheran church who spoke of God and grace; his biographer described him as religiously tolerant. Source: Wikipedia