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was born at Braunschweig on April 30, 1777. His father, George Dietrich, was a mason, who employed himself otherwise in the hard winter months, and finally became cashier to a Todtencasse, or burial fund. His mother Dorothy was the daughter of Christian Benze of the village of Velpke, near Braunschweig, and a woman of talent, industry, and wit, which her son appears to have inherited. The father died in 1808 after his son had become distinguished. The mother lived to the age of ninety-seven, but became totally blind. She preserved her low Saxon dialect, her blue linen dress and simple country manners, to the last, while living beside her son at the Observatory of Göttingen. Frederic, her younger brother, was a damask weaver, but a man with a natural turn for mathematics and mechanics.

When Gauss was a boy, his parents lived in a small house in the Wendengrahen, on a canal which joined the Ocker, a stream flowing through Braunschweig. The canal is now covered, and is the site of the Wilhelmstrasse, but a tablet marks the house. When a child, Gauss used to play on the bank of the canal, and falling in one day he was nearly drowned. He learned to read by asking the letters from his friends, and also by studying an old calendar which hung on a wall of his father's house, and when four years old he knew all the numbers on it, in spite of a shortness of sight which afflicted him to the end. On Saturday nights his father paid his workmen their wages, and once the boy, who had been listening to his calculations, jumped up and told him that he was wrong. Revision showed that his son was right.

At the age of seven, Gauss went to the Catherine Parish School at Braunschweig, and remained at it for several years. The master's name was Büttner, and from a raised seat in the