Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855)

Carl Friedrich Gauss was born in Brunswick and was so mathematically talented that starting at age 15, he received a stipend from the duke of Brunswick to fund his education. Gauss studied mathematics and ancient languages in secondary school. Then he studied math at the University of Göttingen and went on to earn a doctorate degree from the university at Helmstedt. He could have easily found work, but was still receiving a stipend from the duke, so he only found employment after the duke died. He taught mathematics and lead the observatory at the University of Göttingen.

Gauss worked in many branches of mathematics and made contributions to each. For example, he discovered how to construct a regular $17$-gon using a ruler and straightedge. He also predicted paths of celestial bodies. His calculations relied on least squares methods, like Legendre (1752-1833), but he claimed that he discovered the method. If his work had been studied more by statisticians, it is possible that analysis of variance and regression would have been developed much more easily. He recognized that observational errors (calculated by finding the difference of each observation from the arithmetic mean) followed a normal distribution. Because of his extensive work making use of the normal distribution, the normal distribution is often referred to as the Gaussian distribution.