To praise it would amount to praising myself. For the entire content of the work... coincides almost exactly with my own meditations which have occupied my mind for the past thirty or thirty-five years.

Sometimes referred to as the Princeps mathematicorum (Latin "the Prince of Mathematicians" or "the foremost of mathematicians") and "greatest mathematician since antiquity" Gauss had a remarkable influence in many fields of mathematics and science and is ranked as one of history's most influential mathematicians. He referred to mathematics as "the queen of sciences".