The genius of Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855) and the velty of his work (published in Latin, German, and occasionally French) in areas as diverse as number theory, probability and astromy were already widely ackwledged during his lifetime. But it took ather three generations of mathematicians to reveal the true extent of his output as they studied Gauss' extensive unpublished papers and his volumius correspondence. This posthumous twelve-volume collection of Gauss' complete works, published between 1863 and 1933, marks the culmination of their efforts and provides a fascinating account of one of the great scientific minds of the nineteenth century. Volume 1 reproduces the 1801 Disquisitiones arithmeticae, a masterpiece of mathematical rigour, in which Gauss drew together and greatly extended the number-theoretic kwledge of his time. The final chapter, on the criterion for the constructibility of a regular polygon, solved a problem that had been open since antiquity.
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Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Library Collection