Gauss was responsible, in a paper published in 1809, for developing the statistical theory underlying the method of least squares. He was educated at U Göttingen and U Helmstedt, obtaining his doctorate from the latter in 1799. His work on least squares, which was a consequence of his appointment as director of the observatory at Göttingen in 1807, also entailed his deriving an appropriate error distribution—the distribution now called the normal distribution or Gaussian distribution. He was elected FRS in 1804 and awarded the Society's Copley Medal in 1838. He was elected FRSE in 1820. A lunar crater is named after him.

http://www.umass.edu/wsp/resources/poisson/gauss.html Information and portraits.