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Comment by jordigh | Hacker News Reader

Does Gauss's headstone actually have a 17-pointed star on the back? I can't find any pictures of this online.

Gauss's tombstone actually has a circle[1]. Gauss wanted the heptadecagon (not stellated, a regular 17-gon) but the mason making the tombstone decided it was similar enough to a circle for it not to matter and doing a 17-gon was too hard so he just did a circle.

So arguably the greatest mathematician of all time[2] wanted a particular tribute to something he did while a teenager, felt was one of his greatest achievements (because the problem had been unsolved for over 2000 years) and someone just decided they couldn't be arsed.

The whole thing is described really well here, including showing the full construction https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EX7U0DGBmbM

[1] Picture here https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/grave-of-carl-friedrich-...

[2] My vote would go for Euler, but a lot of people feel Gauss.

The headstone (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Friedrich_Gau%C3%9F#/medi...) does not (it does feature the star of David, but I couldn't find any notion that Gauß was jewish).

But there's a statue with that star (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Friedrich_Gau%C3%9F#/medi...)

Gauß wasn’t jewish and it was a Christian cemetery. The gravestone insinuates the form of a cross and the David star just symbolizes the Old Testament.

FYI Gauss's grave is in Albani cemetery, 37085 Göttingen, Germany. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albanifriedhof

But per below comments, the star is on the monument in Brunswick/Braunschweig, not on his headstone.

The end of the article indicates it does not

Huh? No, the article says the stonemason chose a star because nobody would be able to tell that a 17-gon isn't a circle. I have heard this story repeated before in Gaussian biographies, but I'm surprised I can't find a single picture online that shows that this did or did not happen.

The article says the 17-point star is on a monument to Gauss in his home town of Brunswick Germany, not on his headstone.

An image search for "gauss monument brunswick germany" on Duck Duck Go includes a picture of the 17-point star at this link:

https://www.braunschweig.de/leben/stadtportraet/stadtteile/n...

I can't go to it to confirm because we are blocked from going to foreign links at my work place. It looks like the star is on the left side of the monument near his right foot.

Image showing the star on the statue https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Braunschweig_Gauss...

If they made the sides slightly outwardly concave, think an opened bottle cap, it would highlight the vertices and I think that would help people identify it as a polygon rather then a circle --I definitely could be wrong though.

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