Carl Friedrich Gauß

The son of a bricklayer, Gauss corrected his father's accounts at three and worked out how to construct a regular seventeen-sided polygon at eighteen. He gave mathematics the method of least squares, modular arithmetic and the normal distribution that carries his name.

In 1801 he calculated the orbit of the newly lost asteroid Ceres from a handful of observations, and astronomers found it again exactly where he said it would be. He spent almost his whole career in Göttingen and is buried there.