Carl Friedrich Gauss

Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777 to 1855) was a German polymath active as a mathematician, astronomer, geodesist and physicist, who was director of the Göttingen Observatory and professor of astronomy from 1807 until his death. His computing relevance lies in numerical method: his source says that his work on the motion of planetoids led to the method of least squares, which he had discovered before Legendre published it, and that he also introduced the algorithm known as recursive least squares. He was a lifelong busy and enthusiastic calculator, working extraordinarily quickly and checking his results through estimation. He won the Lalande Prize in 1809 and the Copley Medal in 1838. This entry is the computing facet of a figure the atlas also holds in mathematics.