So Who is Gauss?

At the beginning of this past unit starting electricity, we learned about Gauss's Law and how it was going to be the start of a lot of work in the future with it. I, as do many, need to spend some more time and focus on getting this figured out soon because I have a strong feeling that this will be something I struggle with for the rest of the year if I do not understand some of it soon!

Although this idea was named after Gauss, Joseph-Louis Lagrange started work on this law 40 years prior to Gauss. They both put contributions towards Gauss's Law which relates the distribution of electric charge to the resulting electric field. Now, this post is really going to be about the man that created the law, Carl Friedrich Gauss. Gauss was a German mathematician who huge contributions in many areas including algebra, geophysics, mechanics, electrostatics, magnetic fields and optics. Gauss was a child prodigy when it came to math and science. Growing up, he was a perfectionist and a hard worker who devoted his life to mathematics. He had two wives and six children who, in the course of his life, all died except for one of his children. Due to these tragedies, Gauss lived a depressed and miserable life until he died at 77 in 1855. 

Gauss's work paved the way for a whole new understanding in the field of electricity and magnetism which now allows us high school physics students to somewhat understand some electricity in physics! I do not understand it now, but I am now determined to learn and focus on this!

Until next time,

RK