Gauss is a genius mathematician, but not a great mathematician. He should have to say: calculus is the queen of mathematics. He faced rather to the past, than to the future, as M. Kline said. This is quite a historical tragedy The key of this tragedy is: Gauss was educated in his youth by the spirit of ancient Greece mathematics, but not by the current (in his time) mathematics of variable quantities, as Euler, Lagrange and Cauchy were. |