Carl Friedrich Gauss — the bricklayer’s son who corrected his father’s arithmetic at three and was called princeps mathematicorum by his peers — receives in this Umriss a compact German account of his life and work: the Disquisitiones, the rediscovery of Ceres, the geodetic survey of Hanover, and the magnetism researches with Weber.
Short enough for an evening, it is a fine first meeting with the greatest mathematician of the modern age. Download the free EPUB, in the original German.