This article presents a brief biography of Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss. Gauss was born on April 30, 1777, in the German city of Braunschweig (Brunswick). He was the only child of Gebhard Dietrich Gauss and Dorothea Benze. Neither of Gauss's parents had much education, his father could read and write, but earned his living doing menial jobs such as gardening and as a street butcher; his mother could read but not write. While still a teenager, Gauss propounded the theory of least squares, demonstrated a solution to the age-old problem of dividing a circle into 17 parts, and made important mathematical discoveries which he was too shy to publish, and entrusted only to his diary.