Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk

Chapter 8

The Supreme Law of Unreason

During the last 27 years of his life, which ended at the age of 78 in 1855, Carl Friedrich Gauss slept only once away from his home in Göttingen.1 Indeed, he had refused professorships and had declined honors from the most distinguished universities in Europe because of his distaste for travel.

Like many mathematicians before and after him, Gauss also was a childhood genius—a fact that displeased his father as much as it seems to have pleased his mother. His father was an uncouth laborer who despised the boy’s intellectual precocity and made life as difficult as possible for him. His mother struggled to protect him and to encourage his progress; Gauss remained deeply devoted to her for as long as she lived.

Gauss’s biographers supply all the usual stories of mathematical miracles at an age when most people can barely manage to divide 24 by 12. His memory for numbers was so enormous that he carried the logarithmic tables in his head, available on instant recall. At the age of eighteen, he made a discovery about the geometry of a seventeen-sided polygon; nothing like this had happened in mathematics since the days of the great Greek mathematicians 2,000 years earlier. His doctoral thesis, “A New Proof That Every Rational Integer Function of One Variable Can Be Resolved into Real Factors of the First or Second Degree,” is recognized by the cognoscenti as the fundamental theorem of algebra. The concept was not new, but the proof was.

Gauss’s fame ...