Love your site on Gauss! I did a project on Gauss and found your site to be more helpful than any encyclopedia or book. I have a question for you: What do you think Gauss' greatest contribution to mathematics is? My friends and I are disagreeing and we want to know your opinion.
Also, your appendix link from the home page is broke, I got a 404 not found.
Well, thanks for your time and cooperation, and look foward to hearing from you.
Sincerely,
Katy Onstad
FOLLOW-UP:
Dear Katy,
Thank you very much for your kind words. I have been recieving a lot of mail ever since the guestbook has broken, but I have an geocity engineer looking at it right now. Yeah, I know that the appendix link is broken, I found that out yesterday, but hadn't a chance to fix it, but you can still get to it by the little navigational key on the bottom of the related Gauss pages. Or for your convience, it's:
http://www.geocities.com/RainForest/Vines/2977/gauss/appendix/appendix.html
Well, I got all of my Gauss information out of books, except for one thing. So, you can just think of it as an anthology that I translated into language that most people can understand.
Okay, on to the opinion part.
Well, I am a physics major, so I was personally bored with the mathematics part, but put it up simply because I knew it was important. BUT.... I would have to say that Gauss' most important contribution to mathematics is his work in non-Euclidean geometry. I don't want to treat you as someone unknowledgeable in this, so don't take any offense into this. Just through my experience with tutoring, etc, no one has ever understood what Euclidean geometry is. So, in case if the work is due tomorrow (I'm guessing it is a report for school), I'll explain it now.
I'm sure that you were taught in elementary school that the sum of the angles in a triangle are equal to 180 degrees, right? That's one of the properties that Euclid developed, so, we named this after him, hence, EUCLIDean geometry. It makes sense, if you drew a triangle on a piece of paper, the sum of the angles would equal 180. The piece of paper would represent the Euclidean surface, or the plane. (euclidean geometry is also known as Plane geometry).
But think about it if you didn't draw it on a piece of paper? What if you took three points on a sphere, such as three cities on a globe, and drew straight lines? That would still be a triangle, however, the angles would no longer add up to 180 degrees.
That's probably the best example (and easiest) that I can give. The obvious is that this property definately helped in finding short distances for plane flights.
Also, if you want to think of it even more modern. I'm not quite sure about this, but it would be safe to say so. One of Albert Einstein's (surely everyone has heard of him) famous ideas was that Space was 4-D (Four Dementional). Space being 3 dimentions, and time being the fourth. This is the beginning of Quantum Theories. (No way am I gonna get into that... it'd be off topic)
Well, that's my little statement for today. Feel free to quote that for your report if you want to. :o)
I enjoy replying to these e-mails to help people. It's always been a goal for me to be in someone's Works Cited List. :o) So, not only are you welcome for the information, but thank you for making it worth my time for the hours I spent on it!
Sincerely,
Nelly Cung
P.S. If you don't mind, I would like to add your statement into my guestbook when it's fixed, I'll add it in for you.
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