Carl Friedrich Gauss "discovered" non-Euclidean geometry when he was the age of 15.  Around 1815, a 13-year old math prodigy named Janos Bolyai has mastered differential and integral calculus.  Bolyai's father wrote a letter to Gauss begging for his son to be his apprentice mathematician.  Although Gauss never replied to his father's request, about 15 years later, Gauss received what is known at the "Tentamen" from Bolyai.  Coincidentally, it was on non-Euclidean geometry, with the same types of thoughts that Gauss had about the subject.  Gauss was impressed and replied back to Bolyai and his father, praising the young man's work.  Disappointingly, Gauss did not publicize the work because according to Gauss he had "a great antipathy against being drawn into any sort of polemic."  Gauss did not feel the world was ready for what he was doing, and not only that, he was a perfectionist; he worked on non-Euclidean geometry for nearly 35 years when Bolyai's father sent him his work.  Gauss was also preoccupied in other branches of math, astronomy, geodesy, and physics.  The few results that he did record on non-Euclidean geometry were found among his private papers after his death.  Gauss is considered "the prince of mathematics"  because his work was so wide ranged.

Author: Esther Landin

References:
Marvin Jay Greenberg, Euclidean and Non-Euclidean Geometries:  Development and History.  3rd ed.,  W.H. Freeman and Company.  New York