Talk:Carl Friedrich Gauss

Gauss in MacTutor
MacTutor is a useful encyclopedia of biographies. Some months ago, I have removed the MacTutor Gauss article from the external link collection. Why? I found a lot of errors, here there are:


 * the school anecdote: is given as a proved fact
 * Gauss discovered Bode's law: Bode's law, the Titius–Bode law, was discovered in 1772.
 * "Gauss's teacher there was Kästner": right, but misleading, he was not the only one, e.g. Heyne, Lichtenberg.
 * "Bolyai [was his] only known friend": In the Wikipedia article I have given other names.
 * "They [Bolyai and G.] met in 1799": right, but this was their last meeting, they met first in 1796
 * "left Göttingen in 1798 without a diploma": misleading, as if he had finally broken off his studies
 * "returned to Brunswick where he received a degree in 1799": definitely no! Which degree? The stories is correctly told in the next sentences, the doctor diploma from Helmstedt University.
 * "began corresponding with Bessel, whom he did not meet until 1825": Gauss and Bessel met in 1807, 1810, 1825, and 1842.
 * "he went on making observations until the age of 70." Right, but longer, thus misleading. His last observation was with 74.
 * "Berlin University" must be replaced by "Prussian Academy", these were different institutions.
 * "Minna and her family were keen to move there": I would like to read a reliable proof for this.
 * "In 1837, Weber was forced to leave Göttingen": no, he was dismissed, but went on working with Gauss very intensively. He left Göttingen voluntarily in 1842.

Errare humanum est, and nobody is perfect, but this is too much. And worse, there are 67 references at all, but I cannot find one single inline-reference, so we can't see, whether this errors are MacTutor-made or yet in the sources. We could not produce a WP-lemma in this way, and thus the MacTutor text cannot be a reference for it. And in addition, I think it's not useful for readers, if they find facts different in the external links than in the Wikipedia text. Dioskorides (talk) 21:38, 10 April 2024 (UTC)

Ambigeous Referencing
Referencing to Gauss' writings is a special problem. For example this paper:


 * 1841:    Original (from 1832)

He wrote this in 1832, and presented it to the Royal Academy at its session on 15 December 1832, see the subtitle of the publication Commentatio auctore Carolo Friderica Gauss in concessu Societatis MDCCCXXXII Dec. XV recitata This first publication is part of the series with full title Commentationes Societatis Regiae Scientiarum Gottingensis Recentiores Volumen VIII ad a. MDCCCXXXII - XXXVII; it's edited Gottingae MDCCCXLI. So we have a text of 1832, published in 1841 in the issue of a series for the years 1832–1837.

If we refer to it in the text in the form ...Gauss (18xy), what could "xy" be: Gauss (1832), Gauss (1832-1837), (Gauss 1837), or Gauss (1841)? When I prepared the text, I have seen a certain text with different years in the different sources several times. This may cause confusion.

In the "Selected Writings" chapter I give at first the year of editorial publication, with a link to the digitalized Collected Works. We usually refer to the written text, and it is often necessary to make clear, when his contemporaries could get notice of it. But if we write: "Gauss developed his ideas on magnetism in 18xy", we should take the earliest year for xy, otherwise it were wrong. So, when necessary, I gave the early year in brackets at the of the source, and, in addition, a link to the original per, too, so anyone can check the dates. Dioskorides (talk) 15:47, 12 April 2024 (UTC)