Google is honoring the life of lauded mathematician Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss with a signature Google Doodle issued today, on what would have been Gauss' 241st birthday.
Known as the "Prince of Mathematics," Gauss has made critical contributions to the fields of mathematics and science and is even referred to as the "greatest mathematician since antiquity."
Gauss was born on April 30, 1777, in Brunswick, Germany. A child prodigy, he is fabled for calculating his own date of birth after his mother failed to record it.
According to USA UK News, which cites an article published by Bruce Director in The American Almanac, her only recollection regarding the actual date her first son was born "was that it was a Wednesday, eight days before Ascension Day, which occurs 40 days after Easter Sunday." Gauss solved the puzzle of his date of birth at the age of 22 "by developing a method for calculating the date of Easter Sunday, for any year, past, present or future," Director wrote in his article, titled "Mind Over Mathematics: How Gauss Determined The Date of His Birth."
His early childhood is rife with anecdotal episodes that mirror his advanced mathematical skills, Story of Mathematics reports. For instance, Gauss corrected an error in his father payroll calculations when he was just 3-years-old. By the age of 5, he was regularly looking after his father's accounts. At the age of 7, he figured out how to add up the numbers from 1 to 100 in a matter of seconds, after having spotted that the sum was actually 50 pairs of numbers, with each pair summing to 101 and a total of 5,050.
