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Gauss was born in Braunschweig, in the Electorate of Brunswick-Lüneburg, now part of Lower Saxony, Germany, as the only son of poor working-class parents.[3] There are several stories of his early genius, all of them open to doubt; according to one, his gifts became very apparent at the age of three when he corrected, in his head, an error his father had made on paper while calculating finances.
Another famous story, and one that has evolved in the telling, has it that in primary school his teacher, J.G. Büttner, tried to occupy pupils by making them add a list of integers. The young Gauss reputedly produced the correct answer within seconds, to the astonishment of his teacher and his assistant Martin Bartels. Gauss' presumed method, which supposes the list of numbers was from 1 to 100, was to realise that pairwise addition of terms from opposite ends of the list yielded identical intermediate sums: 1 + 100 = 101, 2 + 99 = 101, 3 + 98 = 101, and so on, for a total sum of 50 × 101 = 5050 (see arithmetic series and summation).[4] However whilst the method works, the incident itself is probably apocryphal; some, such as Joseph Rotman in his book A first course in Abstract Algebra, question whether it ever happened.
As his father wanted him to follow in his footsteps and become a mason, he was not supportive of Gauss's schooling in mathematics and science. Gauss was primarily supported by his mother in this effort and by the Duke of Braunschweig,[2] who awarded Gauss a fellowship to the Collegium Carolinum (now Technische Universität Braunschweig), which he attended from 1792 to 1795, and subsequently he moved to the University of Göttingen from 1795 to 1798. While in university, Gauss independently rediscovered several important theorems;[citation needed] his breakthrough occurred in 1796 when he was able to show that any regular polygon with a number of sides which is a Fermat prime (and, consequently, those polygons with any number of sides which is the product of distinct Fermat primes and a power of 2) can be constructed by compass and straightedge. This was a major discovery in an important field of mathematics; construction problems had occupied mathematicians since the days of the Ancient Greeks, and the discovery ultimately led Gauss to choose mathematics instead of philology as a career. Gauss was so pleased by this result that he requested that a regular heptadecagon be inscribed on his tombstone. The stonemason declined, stating that the difficult construction would essentially look like a circle.
The year 1796 was most productive for both Gauss and number theory. He discovered a construction of the heptadecagon on March 30.[5] He invented modular arithmetic, greatly simplifying manipulations in number theory. He became the first to prove the quadratic reciprocity law on April 8. This remarkably general law allows mathematicians to determine the solvability of any quadratic equation in modular arithmetic. The prime number theorem, conjectured on May 31, gives a good understanding of how the prime numbers are distributed among the integers. Gauss also discovered that every positive integer is representable as a sum of at most three triangular numbers on July 10 and then jotted down in his diary the famous words, "Heureka! num = Δ + Δ + Δ." On October 1 he published a result on the number of solutions of polynomials with coefficients in finite fields, which ultimately led to the Weil conjectures 150 years later.
