Math Project

“Carl Friedrich Gauss”

Highway Engineering Department – Second stage

Erbil Polytechnic University
2020-2021

Prepared By:
Hoshmand Abdulrazaq Braim
Supervised By:
Skala Hatem Mohammed
 Who is Carl Friedrich Gauss

Biography

Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss is sometimes referred to as the “Prince of

Mathematicians” and the “greatest mathematician since antiquity”. He has had a
remarkable influence in many fields of mathematics and science and is ranked as
one of history’s most influential mathematicians.

Gauss was a child prodigy. There are many anecdotes concerning his precocity as
a child, and he made his first ground-breaking mathematical discoveries while still
a teenager.

At just three years old, he corrected an error in his father payroll calculations, and
he was looking after his father’s accounts on a regular basis by the age of 5. At the
age of 7, he is reported to have amazed his teachers by summing the integers
from 1 to 100 almost instantly (having quickly spotted that the sum was actually
50 pairs of numbers, with each pair summing to 101, total 5,050). By the age of
12, he was already attending gymnasium and criticizing Euclid’s geometry.
Gauss Theory

Although he made contributions in almost all fields of mathematics, number

theory was always Gauss’ favourite area, and he asserted that “mathematics is
the queen of the sciences, and the theory of numbers is the queen of
mathematics”. An example of how Gauss revolutionized number theory can be
seen in his work with complex numbers (combinations of real and imaginary
numbers).

Gauss gave the first clear

exposition of complex
numbers and of the
investigation of functions
of complex variables in
the early 19th Century.
Although imaginary
numbers involving i (the
imaginary unit, equal to
the square root of -1) had
been used since as early
as the 16th Century to
solve equations that Representation of complex numbers
could not be solved in
any other way, and despite Euler’s ground-breaking work on imaginary and
complex numbers in the 18th Century, there was still no clear picture of how
imaginary numbers connected with real numbers until the early 19th Century.
Gauss was not the first to intepret complex numbers graphically (Jean-Robert
Argand produced his Argand diagrams in 1806, and the Dane Caspar Wessel had
described similar ideas even before the turn of the century), but Gauss was
certainly responsible for popularizing the practice and also formally introduced
the standard notation a + bi for complex numbers. As a result, the theory of
complex numbers received a notable expansion, and its full potential began to be
unleashed.

The law of quadratic recipocity, Gauss' "Golden Theorem"

"The elementary properties of quadratic congruences and a method for their

solution were studied in a previous chapter. Now, we focus our attention on some
deeper properties of numbers that were discovered by Euler, Legendre, and Gauss.
The simplest of these are the following.

1. The odd prime divisors of numbers of the form   are of the form 4k+1.
2. The odd prime divisors of numbers of the form   are of the form 8k+1
or 8k-1.
3. The odd prime divisors (also not 3) of numbers of the form   are of the
form 12k+1 or 12k-1.
4. The prime divisors (not equal to 2 or 5) of numbers of the form   are of
the form 20k+1, 20k-1, 20k+9 or 20k-9.

Generalizing these results, Euler conjectured that the prime divisors p of numbers

of the form   are of the form   or   , for some odd b. This is
the Quadratic Reciprocity Law. The first complete proof of this law was given by
Gauss in 1796. Gauss gave eight different proofs of the law and we discuss a proof
that Gauss gave in 1808.
 what is the sum of the first 100 whole numbers

Gauss was asked to find the sum of the numbers from 1 to 100.  The question was
assigned as “busy work” by the teacher, but Gauss found the answer rather
quickly by discovering a pattern.  His observation was as follows:

1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + … + 98 + 99 + 100

Gauss noticed that if he was to split the numbers into two groups (1 to 50 and 51
to 100), he could add them together vertically to get a sum of 101.

1     + 2   + 3   + 4   + 5   + … + 48 + 49 + 50

100 + 99 + 98 + 97 + 96 + … + 53 + 52 + 51

1 + 100 = 101
2 + 99 = 101
3 + 98 = 101
.
.
.
48 + 53 = 101
49 + 52 = 101
50 + 51 = 101

Gauss realized then that his final total would be 50(101) = 5050.

The sequence of numbers (1, 2, 3, … , 100) is arithmetic and when we are looking
for the sum of a sequence, we call it a series.  Thanks to Gauss, there is a special
formula we can use to find the sum of a series:

       
S is the sum of the series and n is the number of terms in the series, in this case,

100.

Carl Fridrich Gauss Equation

One of the reasons why Gauss was able to contribute so much math over his
lifetime was that he got a very early start. There are many tales of his childhood
precociousness. The most famous anecdote of young Gauss is the time he found
the shortcut for calculating the sum of an arithmetic progression at the tender
age of 10.

The anecdote involves his schoolteacher who wanted to take a rest and asked the
students to sum the integers from 1 to 100 as busy work. After a few seconds, the
teacher saw Gauss sitting idle. When asked why he was not frantically doing
addition, Gauss quickly replied that the sum was 5050. His classmates and teacher
were astonished, and Gauss ended up being the only pupil to calculate the correct
answer.

The story may be apocryphal, and is told different ways in different sources.
Nobody is sure which method of summing an arithmetic sequence Gauss figured
out as a child. Though there are several ways young Gauss might have solved it,
one of them has a concise, intuitive, and elegant visual representation.

1+2+3+ \cdots +(n-1)+n = ?1+2+3+⋯+(n−1)+n=?

Fig 1:
Arithmetic Progression
Consider two sets of marbles as shown in the Figure 1. The left pile has nn rows of
blue marbles, where the j^\text{th}jth row contains jj marbles. The right pile
has nn rows of red marbles, where the j^\text{th}jth row contains n+1-
jn+1−j marbles.

The total number of blue marbles is given by

1+2 +3+ \cdots + (n-1)+n,1+2+3+⋯+(n−1)+n,

while the total number of red marbles is given by

n+(n-1)+(n-2) + \cdots + 2 + 1,n+(n−1)+(n−2)+⋯+2+1,

and clearly both contain the same number of marbles. Now if we were to add
these piles together as shown in Figure 2, we would then get a stack
with nn rows, where each row contains n + 1n+1 marbles:

Fig 2:
Arithmetic Progression
The total number of marbles in the added pile would be n(n + 1)n(n+1). Since
both the red pile and the blue pile have an equal number of marbles, each pile
must have contributed \frac{n(n + 1)}{2}2n(n+1) marbles. Hence, we obtain

1+2+3+...+(n-1)+n= \frac{n(n+1)}{2}.1+2+3+...+(n−1)+n=2n(n+1).
To sum all the numbers from 1 to 100, Gauss simply calculated \frac{100\times
(100+1)}{2}=50502100×(100+1)=5050, which is immensely easier than adding all
the numbers from 1 to 100. Note that 1+2+3 + \cdots +(n-1)+n1+2+3+⋯+
(n−1)+n must always be a positive integer. Even though the above formula divides
by 2, the result will always be a positive integer. This is because the numerator
will always be conveniently even due to the multiplication properties of parity.
For example, nn could either be even or odd. If nn is even, then n+1n+1 is odd and
hence
n \times (n + 1) = even \times odd = even.n×(n+1)=even×odd=even.
Similarly, if nn is odd, then n + 1n+1 is even and hence

n \times (n + 1) = odd \times even = even.n×(n+1)=odd×even=even.

Therefore, the numerator is always even and \frac{n(n + 1)}22n(n+1) is always a
positive integer.

Numbers of the form \frac{n(n + 1)}{2}2n(n+1) are called triangular numbers, for

reasons well illustrated in the above figures. The first few triangular numbers are

1,3,6,10,15,21,28,36, \ldots.1,3,6,10,15,21,28,36,….
It is commonplace to encounter an application of summing an arithmetic
sequence, both in classroom problems, and in describing the broader world. It is
less common to meet 10 year olds who figure out the tricks of arithmetic
progression for themselves. It is even less common for a precocious 10 year old to
grow up to be nearly as prolific as Gauss.
Reference:-

https://brilliant.org/wiki/gauss-the-prince-of-mathematics/
http://mathcentral.uregina.ca/qq/database/qq.02.06/jo1.html
https://www.storyofmathematics.com/19th_gauss.html