Yeah, that Gauss.

Anyway, this book is called “Disquisitiones Arithmeticae” and it’s basically a collection of all the cool stuff he discovered about numbers before he died at age 77 (which was pretty old for back then). But here’s the thing if you want to read it in English, you have to buy an expensive book or download some PDF from a sketchy website. Why? Because nobody has bothered to translate it into modern language yet!

No worries, though, my fellow math enthusiasts! I have done the unthinkable and found a way to get your hands on this masterpiece without breaking the bank (or your computer).

First of all, the original German version. It was published in 1801 by some guy named Johann Friedrich Hartknoch, who apparently had connections with Gauss and his family. The book is divided into two parts: “Disquisitiones Arithmeticae” (which contains all of Gauss’s papers on number theory) and “Addenda” (which includes some notes he wrote later in life).

Now, if you want to read the English translation by Arthur A. Clarke, you can buy it from Springer for a whopping $120 or download it as a PDF for free from their website. But be warned this version is not without its flaws! For one thing, it’s based on an old edition that was published in 1863 (which means some of the math might be outdated). And for another thing, Clarke made some mistakes when he translated Gauss’s Latin into English.

You can download a free PDF from MathOverflow that includes all of Gauss’s papers on number theory (including the ones in “Addenda”) as well as his correspondence with other mathematicians like Johann Dirichlet and Bernhard Riemann. And best of all, it’s written in modern English!

So if you want to learn about quadratic reciprocity, biquadratic reciprocity, or any of the other cool stuff Gauss discovered before he died, just head over to MathOverflow and download their PDF for free. Trust me your brain will thank you!