Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss (; , ) (30 April 177723 February 1855) was a German mathematician and physical scientist who contributed significantly to many fields, including number theory, statistics, analysis, differential geometry, geodesy, geophysics, electrostatics, astronomy and optics.

GAUSS is a matrix programming language for mathematics and statistics, developed and marketed by Aptech Systems. Its primary purpose is the solution of numerical problems in statistics, econometrics, time-series, optimization and 2D- and 3D-visualization. It was first published in 1984 for MS-DOS and is currently also available for Linux, Sun SPARC, Mac OS X and Windows.