The twenty-third meeting was held October 2-3 , 2009, at Xavier University: to celebrate the bicentennial of its publication, we read the paper that made Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855) famous as something other than a mathematical prodigy, his work on the computation of the orbit of Ceres (in which he successfully predicted where astronomers would be able to relocate it, within a half a degree of arc, after its passage behind the Sun). Our attention focuses not on the astronomical calculation but on his work in this same paper wherein he lays out his method of least squares for minimizing measurement errors and the function that describes the probability distribution now named after him. We read Section III of Book II of his Theoria motus corporum coelestium in sectionibus conicis solem ambientum (Hamburg, 1809) in the 1857 English translation, Theory of the motion of the heavenly bodies moving about the sun in conic sections, by Charles Henry Davis (available in a 2004 Dover reprint).