THE NATURE OF NUMBER: GAUSS AND LANGUAGE MATHEMATICS

He solved the problem of the missing planet in a few weeks, and told almost no one how. He worked out the geometry of curved space decades before anyone published it, and locked the pages in a drawer. He wrote his most explosive result about an asteroid as a coded cipher, so that he could claim it later without saying it now. Carl Friedrich Gauss, the bricklayer's son who became the Prince of Mathematicians, spent his life inventing two things: an extraordinary quantity of modern science, and a way of writing it down that removes every trace of how a human being got there. This book follows the second invention, because it is the one we all inherited. Along the way it takes in a duke who bought a boy's education, an asteroid that vanished behind the sun, ten summers of dragging survey instruments across a heath, the first electric telegraph strung over the rooftops of a university town, a magnetic needle that quietly buried a rival theory of the earth, and a young Hungarian whose life was broken by one polite letter. It also takes in an ordinary man: grieving, difficult, tender in the wrong places, counting the days of his friends' lives because he could not stop counting. Boris Kriger writes as a working researcher rather than a spectator, and where he disagrees with his subject he says so. In one chapter he takes an instrument Gauss invented in 1833 and left unpublished, and reports what it shows when applied to the largest structures in the universe. There is not a single equation in these pages. There is a great deal of arithmetic in them, all of it done in words. Keywords: Gauss, history of mathematics, number theory, astronomy, geodesy, magnetism, scientific discovery