Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855) is so dominant that his nickname is simply the Prince of Mathematicians. The famous schoolboy story is true to type: told to add the numbers from 1 to 100 to keep him busy, he saw in seconds that they pair up into fifty hundreds and wrote down 5050 almost at once.

His name is everywhere

Once you start looking, Gauss is impossible to avoid. The bell curve is the Gaussian distribution; the beautiful identity that the area under it is exactly \sqrt{\pi} is the Gaussian integral; and one of the great theorems of vector calculus — that the outward flux through a closed surface equals the divergence inside — is Gauss's theorem:

He also rediscovered the lost asteroid Ceres by sheer calculation, founded modern number theory, surveyed kingdoms, and studied magnetism (the unit is named for him too).

Few, but ripe

Gauss was a perfectionist to a fault. His motto was "pauca sed matura" — few but ripe — and he published only what he considered flawless, burying the rest in his diaries. The cost was real: he had worked out non-Euclidean geometry and pieces of complex analysis years before others published them, but kept silent rather than release anything unpolished. He taught the next generation directly, including Riemann and his last student Dedekind.

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The full story (with far fewer jokes) is on Wikipedia: Carl Friedrich Gauss — Wikipedia.