Curiously enough, Gauss seems much better remembered among mathematicians and historians of mathematics than among other groups of his intellectual descendants, and to be better remembered for his mathematics and statistics than for any other aspects of his work. At least, searches of the literature, Web searches, and the like revealed much more scholarship on these matters than any other, except perhaps on the minutiae of his life. Some of this perception is doubtless due to my own limitations, some perhaps to the longer memory mathematicians have for their subject than scientists do. After all, much of what Gauss did in number theory is suitable today for advanced undergraduate courses if not still a topic for graduate school, but Gauss’s work on statistics has become just one tool among many, astronomers search distant galaxies for new science (and the asteroids more for threats to our survival), and geodesy has been transformed by satellites and computers. His lasting contribution to electro-magnetic theory is the mathematics of potential theory, not the physics or the technology inherent in his achievements.
Accordingly, additional material on number theory, algebra, function theory, differential geometry, topology, and non-Euclidean geometry, has been collected together in the above-mentioned Appendix, whereas the commentaries I have added to Dunnington’s book updating it on astronomy, surveying and geodesy, magnetism and the telegraph, and statistics will be found after the Appendix in the annotated bibliographical essay, organised by topic. These commentaries should be thought of as a lightly annotated bibliography, in which some entries appear without further comment by me. As noted above, I do not claim completeness here.
Guy Waldo Dunnington
by Fritz-Egbert Dohse
It may seem somewhat strange that it was an American professor of German, G. Waldo Dunnington, who undertook the enormous task of compiling resource material for the first comprehensive biography of one of the greatest mathematicians of all time: Carl Friedrich Gauss. The author was born in Bowling Green, Missouri, in 1906, though his ancestry goes back to Colonial Virginia, Maryland and Massachusetts. As a twelve-year-old, he learned the basic principles of mathematics from a charming young teacher, Miss Minna Waldeck Gauss, a grand-daughter of Gauss’ third son Eugen. Besides teaching mathematics to her class, she also told stories from time to time about her famous great-grandfather. Intrigued, young Waldo asked his teacher for a book about the great scientist, in order to learn more about him. When Miss Gauss responded that no full-length biography existed either in English or German, the boy declared that someday he would write one. Thus began a lifelong fascination with Gauss.
Waldo Dunnington completed his primary and secondary education in Missouri. After high school, he enrolled at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, where he earned A.B. and M.A. degrees in German and also took courses in mathematics. Once more struck by the fact that no full-length biography of Gauss was available, he decided then and there to fulfill the promise he had made to his schoolteacher Minna Gauss. In the foreword, he describes how he pursued that goal.
At the University of Illinois, Urbana, he earned a doctorate in German, with a minor in English philology. His dissertation about Jean Paul, the favorite poet of Gauss, was entitled ‘The Relationship of Jean Paul to Karl Philipp Moritz’. He taught German Literature and occasionally the History of Mathematics at various colleges and universities: first in St. Louis, then in Kansas City; later in La Crosse, Wisconsin and, from 1946 to his retirement in 1969, at Northwestern State University in Natchitoches, Louisiana. During World War II, Dunnington served in the US Army. In the fall of 1945 he was briefly assigned to the Nuremberg Trials as an interrogator and interpreter.
Dr. Dunnington published numerous articles, in both English and German, in foreign language and mathematical journals. From 1936 to 1945 he served as associate editor of the National Mathematics Magazine, which became Mathematics Magazine in 1947, heading a department for the humanism and history of mathematics. In 1937, the Louisiana State University Press published his monograph on Carl Friedrich Gauss. His other contributions have appeared in journals such as the Monatshefte für deutschen Unterricht, Jean Paul Blätter, The Scientific Monthly, The Open Book, Scripta Mathematica, and The American Mathematical Monthly, as well as in the Encyclopædia Britannica. He was well liked as a guest speaker, delivering one of the memorial speeches at Gauss’ gravesite in 1955, on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the death of the scientific genius. He was a good teacher, a stickler for detail, a living lexicon of Gauss genealogy, well read and amusing in conversation, loved and respected by his many students.
Upon his death in 1974, Dr. Dunnington left a collection of Gauss memorabilia (including several Gauss letters), assembled in a Gauss Archive and Museum, to Northwestern State University where he had served as an archivist after his retirement in 1969.
Dr. Dunnington was also active in the Lutheran Church as a lay preacher and chairman of the board of elders. During the memorial service for Dunnington in the small church he had loved, the minister recalled his life and work as man and scholar, quoting extensively from the eulogy delivered by Heinrich Ewald on the occasion of Gauss’ death. Dr. Dunnington was buried in his home town of Bowling Green, Missouri, under a red granite tombstone bearing the following inscription on a tetrahedron crowned by a sphere: “G. Waldo Dunnington, Ph.D., born January 16, 1906, died April 10, 1974. Professor of German 1928–1969. Biographer of C. F. Gauss. ‘Jetzt kann mein Geist recht freudig rasten, komm, sanfter Tod, und führ mich fort’ (Now my soul can rest in peace, come, gentle death, and lead me away)”.
Since 1995 an annual presentation, the Dunnington-Gauss Award, has been made to the outstanding student of mathematics at Northwestem State University. The purpose of the award is to honor the author of this book and to remind all those present of the ‘Titan of Science,’ Carl Friedrich Gauss. If today the English-speaking world knows more about Gauss, it is in large measure the result of Dr. Dunnington’s work and devotion to a noble cause.
CARL FRIEDRICH GAUSS:
Titan of Science
I
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Introduction: Family Background
During the years 1813–1832 Germany was in possession of her three greatest geniuses: Goethe, Gauss, and Wagner. To be sure, the three were in various stages of development. Goethe was in his declining years. Gauss at the height of his fame, and Wagner was not yet in the ascendant. The life and works of Goethe have been fully treated, as has the life of Wagner. The sublime attainments of these two men are fairly well known to the general reading public, but what can be said about the lofty achievements of Gauss in the more abstract fields of thought? The average reader outside the scientific field can scarcely tell who he was! Let it be said at this point that no apology need be made for the above grouping.
A student of Heinrich Ewald3 once signified his intention of translating into English the brief monograph on Gauss by Wolfgang Sartorius von Waltershausen, but even this small task was never pushed through to completion. In recent years, especially in 1927, many scholars in Germany have again become interested in Gauss. Nothing more than brief magazine articles and encyclopedia notices have appeared about him in English. The author has had the conviction for some years that a comprehensive life story of Gauss should be presented to the reading public, in English, one that would not be too technical, and yet one complete enough to give a true picture of Carl Friedrich Gauss as man and scientist, and to give his philosophy of life.
The life of this great thinker offers no tragic moments and scenes of excitement and disaster such as we find in Kepler’s or Galileo’s life. His life is marked by the same proportion of happiness and sorrow that one finds in the life of an ordinary human being. Yet we venture to say that his life offers more interesting features than does Newton’s.
What distinguishes him are his fruitful contributions to science, made over a period of more than fifty years. He worked in a sphere which was not accessible to the layman and which even the
most gifted scholars could reach only with the greatest effort. Thus he was little known to the general public. We see him striding on alone from one original discovery to another.
Accurate information about the ancestors of Gauss has recently been given by Rudolf Borch after a search of church records and account books. The family name Gauss, Gaus, and in variant forms Goss, Goess, Gooss, Goes, and Goos, is found very frequently in the region north of Brunswick as far as Meine and Kalberlah. Between the years 1500 and 1600 it occurs especially often from Gross-Schwülper to Essenrode.4 Hänselmann has succeeded in establishing the fact that Hinrich Gooss in Völkenrode was the great-grandfather of Carl Friedrich. Rudolf Borch has located the father of this Hinrich Gooss in Wendeburg (supposedly he was born about 1600 and had migrated from Hanover), where a Hans “Gauss” was living between 1630 and 1660. The form of the name, therefore, had changed. This Hans Gauss had two sons and several daughters; the sons were named Heineke and Henrick (or Henrich). The latter got by marriage a small farm in Völkenrode.
Hinrich Gauss was married three times and had twelve children, four by each marriage. The sons of the third marriage were called Engel or Engelke, Jürgen, and Andreas. Engel Goos had a son named Heinrich Engel, who died in 1843 at the age of ninety-four. He knew of his relationship with Carl Friedrich and visited him at the observatory in Göttingen. Jürgen (Goos) Gauss had a son, Gebhard Dietrich, the father of Carl Friedrich. The fate of a son of Heinrich Engel Goos and the fate of Andreas Goos are unknown. The small farm of Hinrich Gooss went to his son of the second marriage, who also was called Hinrich, and through a daughter of his to the family named Gremmel.
At Völkenrode, which is about an hour and a half from Brunswick in a northwesterly direction, the above-mentioned Hinrich Gooss was united in marriage to Anna Grove, the widow of Hinrich Wehrtmann. The church records reach back to 1649, but the name Goss does not occur there before this entry. The bride was a resident of Völkenrode and the owner of a small farm. She had no children by her first husband; of the second marriage, which lasted until her death twelve years later, there were two daughters. Having become a widower in 1695, Hinrich Gooss married on July 16, 1696, Ilse Geermanns, who bore him a son and three daughters, but died after nine years. On November 24, 1705, he married Katharine Lütke, who bore him during the next twelve years three sons and a daughter.
After Hinrich’s death on October 25, 1726, his younger son of the same name, born in 1690 of the first wife, took over the farm. Hans, who was six years older, was unfit or had no desire to take on himself the burdens of the place. According to the peasant custom, he served his brother as a farm hand, dying single in 1739. Hinrich, who survived him until 1772, left four daughters, one of whom was married to Konrad Gremmel. She inherited the farm.
Henry, the half brother of Hans and Hinrich, by the second marriage, was born in 1700 and died prematurely in 1724. Of the brothers of the third marriage, Engel’s younger brothers, Jürgen and Andreas, had to seek their living in strange towns. Andreas disappears in the darkness; his fate is unknown. The tracks of Jürgen, however, lead us into the city of Brunswick.
A protocol in the “new citizens’ book” reveals that Jürgen presented papers on January 23, 1739; with that step he became established in Brunswick. Just before leaving he had married in Völkenrode Katharine Magdalene Eggelings from Rethen, a Hanoverian village a few hours distant from there. These people might have belonged to their kin, those from Rethen who later at many christenings named Engel Gooss as godfather. But there was also an Anton Gooss from Rethen, who in 1709 got his second wife from Völkenrode. For this reason, Hänselmann supposes that Rethen was the original home of the elder Hinrich Gooss, although its church records do not begin until 1692.
Jürgen Gooss had registered as a day laborer at the city hall in Brunswick, where a note is made of him; he is called a claymason and a street butcher. Both these trades at that time belonged to domestic functions in the flat country. For a country worker who was seeking his living in town, by his own hand, they were closely related; even their union in one person was natural. They could be exchanged according to the time of year; the work of the street butcher began when that of the clay mason left off, and at that time, when the town houses in Brunswick did their own butchering even more generally than later, members of their guild earned substantial salaries.
In the year of Jürgen Gooss’ entry on October 29, 1739, a certain Peter Hoyer, who acted as witness for him at the granting of citizenship, sold to Jürgen Gaus, as the name now runs, his house on the Ritterbrunnen “therefore and of such manner that purchasers shall pay to him yearly in termino Michaelmas 5 thalers and 10 groschen unreminded, and with it, as long as he, Peter Hoyer, shall continue to live, properly and stably, but after his death shall have and hold such house exclusively and hereditarily.”
It was the house No. 10 of the Ritterbrunnen, a narrow building of only two windows’ breadth, as it stood there two centuries later. People called it the “gingerbread slice.” The married couple prospered there fourteen years; their three sons and one daughter were born in the house. In no wise had Jürgen paid too much for it; when it was sold in 1735 it brought 217 thalers.
Jürgen Gauss now bought another house, 1550 Wendengraben, later 30 Wilhelmstrasse. Of the price of 900 thalers he lacked 500, and the mayor, Wilmerding, held a mortgage on it. In order to be able to pay the rest in cash, Jürgen had to borrow back 100 thalers of the proceeds on the old house. Thus the fruit of his own fourteen years’ labor was a mere 85 thalers. For the next twenty-one years of his life his best efforts achieved a decrease of only 200 thalers in this mortgage.
Consumption ended his toilsome life on July 5, 1774, after his wife, just fifty-nine years old, had succumbed to a “bilious fever” on April 3. The daughter mentioned had died as a child. The eldest son, Gebhard Dietrich, born on February 13, 1744, had helped his father in business and on April 28, 1768, had married Dorothea Emerenzia Warnecke. Her name is also given as Sollerich or Sollicher. She brought him a dowry of 150 thalers, and on January 14, 1769, bore him a son, Johann Georg Heinrich. On April 27, 1775, Gebhard Dietrich made an agreement with his brothers Peter Heinrich and Johann Franz Heinrich concerning the father’s estate in this wise: the house was to be his for 800 thalers, including the mortgage of 400 thalers to Mayor Wilmerding and 150 thalers to his wife (née Sollicher).
Gebhard Dietrich was able to pay his brothers their share out of his own means, supplemented by a loan of 125 thalers, which he again received from Mayor Wilmerding. The wiping out of the debt on his portion was the goal he pursued unceasingly and after twenty-five years attained. When he sold his house on June 5, 1800, for 1,700 gold thalers there were no claims against it except the maternal inheritance of his son by the first marriage and that brought by his second wife.
Carl Friedrich Gauss knew of the existence of his two uncles but was of the opinion that they died before his father. It has been impossible to establish any facts about Peter Heinrich. It is quite possible that the families of the late Mr. Emil and Mr. Theodore Gaus in Brooklyn, New York, belong to his line. Their father came to America from Brunswick in the year 1854. Johann Franz Heinrich had descendants, among them a son, who died in 1798 at the age of twenty. Otherwise, his family continued only in the female line and through children of his wife’s second marriage.
Gebhard Dietrich’s first wife died on September 5, 1775, of consumption, aged thirty. On April 25, 1776, he married Dorothea Benze, a daughter of Christoph Benze, deceased, who had been a stonemason in Velpke, a nearby village. The marriage record states on April 16 that she brought to her husband, besides a bed and “eventual linen,” one hundred thalers as a “true” dowry; Dorothea was born on June 18, 1743; she had no special schooling, could not write, and could scarcely read. Gebhard Dietrich was the second in his family; he bore the title of master of waterworks, but carried on various occupations and had assisted his father. During the last fifteen years of his life his only
occupation was gardening. He also assisted a merchant in the Brunswick and Leipzig fairs. Because he wrote and calculated very well, he was placed in charge of the accounts and receipt of money in a large burial insurance company. Gebhard was an absolutely upright, respectable, and really honest man; but in his home he was quite domineering, often rough and uncouth, hence Gauss’ childlike heart could not join itself to him in full confidence and trust, although no misunderstanding ever arose from this, because the son very early became entirely independent of him.
The birth of Carl Friedrich occurred in the house (later a museum and marked with a tablet over the front door) on Wilhelmstrasse5 on April 30, 1777. His mother could not remember the exact day of birth, according to his own story. She only knew that it was on a Wednesday eight days before Ascension. This was the occasion of his later giving the formula by which one can calculate the day on which Easter falls in any year. His half brother, Johann Georg Heinrich, early left the home in order to learn a trade, then “wandered” as was customary and came back to Brunswick in 1794. A dangerous eye trouble rendered it necessary for him to give up his trade, but the father would not tolerate an idler, and since it was too late to begin any other business, he had to become a soldier. In that position he also continued to help his father, but withdrew from military service in 1806, and when Gebhard Dietrich died in 1808, Johann Georg Heinrich took over his duties, which he performed until his death on August 7, 1854. Georg married twice; by the first wife he had a daughter, Caroline Magdalene Dorothee, and a son, Georg Gebhard Albert. The daughter married Eduard Wilhelm Bauermeister. Georg Gebhard Albert had a tin shop; he had been in Munich a long time when he visited his uncle in Göttingen. His son Georg Christian Albert also became a tinman and had his shop on Weberstrasse in Brunswick; he died in 1907. He lost two sons in infancy; his daughter Albertine was Mrs. Böttger and lived at Altewiekring 41, in Brunswick. She, in turn, had two sons, born in 1899 and 1901.
Carl Friedrich Gauss, Titan of Science_A Study of His Life and Work Page 3