section_path: Biography/Personality/Scholar
section_name: Scholar
paragraph_text: Scholar
  
  In the first two decades of the 19th century, Gauss was the only important mathematician in Germany, comparable to the leading French ones; his Disquisitiones Arithmeticae was the first mathematical book from Germany to be translated into the French language.
  
  Gauss was "in front of the new development" with documented research since 1799, his wealth of new ideas, and his rigour of demonstration. Whereas previous mathematicians like Leonhard Euler let the readers take part in their reasoning for new ideas, including certain erroneous deviations from the correct path, Gauss however introduced a new style of direct and complete explanation that did not attempt to show the reader the author's train of thought.
  
  Gauss was the first to restore that rigor of demonstration which we admire in the ancients and which had been forced unduly into the background by the exclusive interest of the preceding period in new developments.
  
  But for himself, he propagated a quite different ideal, given in a letter to Farkas Bolyai as follows:
  
  It is not knowledge, but the act of learning, not possession but the act of getting there, which grants the greatest enjoyment. When I have clarified and exhausted a subject, then I turn away from it, in order to go into darkness again.
  
  The posthumous papers, his scientific diary, and short glosses in his own textbooks show that he worked to a great extent in an empirical way. He was a lifelong busy and enthusiastic calculator, who made his calculations with extraordinary rapidity, mostly without precise controlling, but checked the results by masterly estimation. Nevertheless, his calculations were not always free from mistakes. He coped with the enormous workload by using skillful tools. Gauss used a lot of mathematical tables, examined their exactness, and constructed new tables on various matters for personal use. He developed new tools for effective calculation, for example the Gaussian elimination. It has been taken as a curious feature of his working style that he carried out calculations with a high degree of precision much more than required, and prepared tables with more decimal places than ever requested for practical purposes. Very likely, this method gave him a lot of material which he used in finding theorems in number theory.
  
  Gauss refused to publish work that he did not consider complete and above criticism. This perfectionism was in keeping with the motto of his personal seal Pauca sed Matura ("Few, but Ripe"). Many colleagues encouraged him to publicize new ideas and sometimes rebuked him if he hesitated too long, in their opinion. Gauss defended himself, claiming that the initial discovery of ideas was easy, but preparing a presentable elaboration was a demanding matter for him, for either lack of time or "serenity of mind". Nevertheless, he published many short communications of urgent content in various journals, but left a considerable literary estate, too. Gauss referred to mathematics as "the queen of sciences" and arithmetics as "the queen of mathematics", and supposedly once espoused a belief in the necessity of immediately understanding Euler's identity as a benchmark pursuant to becoming a first-class mathematician.
  
  On certain occasions, Gauss claimed that the ideas of another scholar had already been in his possession previously. Thus his concept of priority as "the first to discover, not the first to publish" differed from that of his scientific contemporaries. In contrast to his perfectionism in presenting mathematical ideas, he was criticized for a negligent way of quoting. He justified himself with a very special view of correct quoting: if he gave references, then only in a quite complete way, with respect to the previous authors of importance, which no one should ignore; but quoting in this way needed knowledge of the history of science and more time than he wished to spend.