>>10918265If Gauss had done only the things people don't remember he did he would still be among the greatest.
Gauss pretty much created Potential Theory (most theorems on your run-in-the-mill potential theory should be called Gauss Theorem).
Maxwell credited Gauss as the one who made electromagnetism into an actual science instead of a bunch of disparaged observations.
It was Gauss who first conjectured that space might be curved,
It was Gauss who found the first ruler and straight edge construction of a polygon that wasn't in Euclid's elements.
No other but Gauss classified which constructs could be constructed. And much Gauss did in the theory of Galois Fields.
Hell, in Jacobi's own words, when he first showed Gauss his work on Elliptic Functions, Gauss picked one of his 10 years old notebooks and showed Jacobi that everything that he had just discovered was already know to Gauss. Jacobi was crestfallen, Gauss was happy because it meant he didn't need to bother writing papers about it anymore and could concentrate in actually interesting stuff.
