Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss (April 30, 1777 - February 23, 1855) was a German mathematician, astronomer and physicist with a wide range of contributions; he is considered to be one of the leading mathematicians of all time.



Gauss was born in Brunswick (German Braunschweig), Duchy of Brunswick (now Germany) as only son of lower class uneducated parents. He impressed his teachers early on; the famous story is that in elementary school, the teacher tried to occupy the ever-inquisitive Gauss by telling him to add up the (whole) numbers from 1 to 100. Shortly thereafter, to the astonishment of all, the young Gauss produced the correct answer, having realized that pairwise addition of terms from opposite ends of the list yielded identical intermediate sums (1 + 100 = 101; 2 + 99 = 101; 3 + 98 = 101; 4 + 97 = 101, etc.).

Gauss earned a scholarship, and in college, he independently rediscovered several important theorems; his breakthrough occurred in 1796 when he correctly characterized all the regular polygons that can be constructed by ruler and compass alone, thereby completing work started by classical Greek mathematicians. Gauss was so pleased by this result that he requested that a regular 17-gon be inscribed on his tombstone.

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David Blackwell
born: April 24, 1919 in Centralia, Illinois.

Professor of statistics. More than 60 publications on Baysian statistics, probability, game theory, set theory, dynamic programming, and information theory. Industrial consultant. Member of the National Academy of Sciences. Past president of the American Statistical Society.

"I love pictures. Formulas and symbols -- I don't especially like them."

"Basically, I'm not interested in doing research and I never have been. I'm interested in understanding, which is quite a different thing."

"While being interviewed, he went to the board several times to 'share something beautiful with somebody else.' David Blackwell, the theoretician, is also a natural-born teacher."