Carl Friedrich Gauss
A bricklayer's son who summed 1 to 100 in his head as a child, relocated a lost dwarf planet with a formula he kept secret for a decade, and sat on a discovery that could have upended geometry rather than face the argument
Carl Friedrich Gauss developed the method of least squares years before anyone else, used it to relocate the lost dwarf planet Ceres in 1801, and later gave the normal distribution its mathematical connection to measurement error and his name. This bio covers his priority dispute with Legendre over least squares, the Disquisitiones Arithmeticae, the Gauss-Markov theorem, and his decision to withhold his own work on non-Euclidean geometry rather than face the controversy it would provoke -- ceding credit to Bolyai and Lobachevsky, who published it later.
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