section_path: Biography/Youth and education
section_name: Youth and education
paragraph_text: Youth and education
  
  Gauss was born on 30 April 1777 in Brunswick in the Duchy of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel (now in the German state of Lower Saxony). His family was of relatively low social status. His father Gebhard Dietrich Gauss (1744–1808) worked variously as a butcher, bricklayer, gardener, and treasurer of a death-benefit fund. Gauss characterized his father as honourable and respected, but rough and dominating at home. He was experienced in writing and calculating, whereas his second wife Dorothea, Carl Friedrich's mother, was nearly illiterate. He had one elder brother from his father's first marriage.
  
  Gauss was a child prodigy in mathematics. When the elementary teachers noticed his intellectual abilities, they brought him to the attention of the Duke of Brunswick who sent him to the local Collegium Carolinum, which he attended from 1792 to 1795 with Eberhard August Wilhelm von Zimmermann as one of his teachers. Thereafter the Duke granted him the resources for studies of mathematics, sciences, and classical languages at the University of Göttingen until 1798. His professor in mathematics was Abraham Gotthelf Kästner, whom Gauss called "the leading mathematician among poets, and the leading poet among mathematicians" because of his epigrams. Astronomy was taught by Karl Felix Seyffer, with whom Gauss stayed in correspondence after graduation; Olbers and Gauss mocked him in their correspondence. On the other hand, he thought highly of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, his teacher of physics, and of Christian Gottlob Heyne, whose lectures in classics Gauss attended with pleasure. Fellow students of this time were Johann Friedrich Benzenberg, Farkas Bolyai, and Heinrich Wilhelm Brandes.
  
  He was likely a self-taught student in mathematics since he independently rediscovered several theorems. He solved a geometrical problem that had occupied mathematicians since the Ancient Greeks, when he determined in 1796 which regular polygons can be constructed by compass and straightedge. This discovery ultimately led Gauss to choose mathematics instead of philology as a career. Gauss's mathematical diary, a collection of short remarks about his results from the years 1796 until 1814, shows that many ideas for his mathematical magnum opus Disquisitiones Arithmeticae (1801) date from this time.