Talk:Carl Friedrich Gauss

Organization

Writing a decent page for my own choice for "greatest mathematician ever" is too daunting at this point. I made a few subject headings, but think we should have agreement between a few authors on an organizational scheme before diving in and filling it in. Any thoughts about how to arrange the aspects of his life? Something bugs me about the Wikipedia entry's organization, but I cannot put my finger on it. It might be that I prefer divorcing his work from his life history, rather than integrating it as in the Wikipedia page. Or maybe it is that if I want to learn about Gauss's contributions to statistics say, it isn't clear scanning down the page where you would want to start reading.Barry R. Smith 00:23, 24 November 2008 (UTC)

For quite some time I was toying with the idea to write about Gauss, the person. It is good that you made a start. Earlier I wrote, among others, about Cauchy, Van der Waals, Maxwell, and most recently Lorentz. The way I organized the articles was: a lead-in that you would find in a short concise encyclopedia, then a longish biography readable by the lay-person (not much about the work), and finally about the work on a more technical level (not too technical because the real hard stuff goes into separate articles). Obviously, I favor such an approach (otherwise I wouldn't have followed it) and would advise you the same. As fas as I know, Gauss's life was fairly uneventful, so that could be short, but his work is a very rich goldmine, so that part should be long.--Paul Wormer 07:49, 24 November 2008 (UTC)