Tribute to greatest mathematician Leonhard Euler (1707-1783)
Chronicle Editor @ Apr 11, 2008
http://www.wilsoncenter.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=wq.essay&essay_id=231266
Excerpts:
Marion and Dunham were paying tribute to the mathematician Leonhard Euler (1707–83), one of the great yet little-known figures from Europe’s Age of Enlightenment. Euler’s discoveries continue to influence such disparate fields as computer networking, harmonics, and statistical analysis, and they did nothing less than transform pure mathematics. Children still learn Euler’s lessons in school. It was Euler, for instance, who gave the name i to the square root of –1. To mark his tercentenary, admirers are holding symposiums, concerts, and a two-week Euler tour, which will stop in St. Petersburg and Berlin, the two cities where he spent his working life, as well as Basel, Switzerland, the city of his birth. There is even an Euler comic book, A Man to Be Reckoned With, in German and English editions.
Compared to Gauss and Newton, both of whom published sparingly, Euler was prolific. This makes the assignment of precedence somewhat subjective. But Archimedes and Newton can hardly be excluded from the top ranks. For sheer breadth and quality of mathematical thought, I believe most scholars would place Gauss ahead of Euler. It is a close call, though, and nobody would disagree that Euler ranks with the crème de la crème in mathematical excellence. So who was he?
Leonhard Euler was born April 15, 1707; into a German-speaking family (the name is pronounced “Oiler”). His father, Paul Euler, was a Calvinist clergyman, and Leonhard remained a firm, uncritical Calvinist his whole life, believing that all events were preordained by God at the Creation. He once wrote a tract defending the truth of Revelation against Enlightenment skeptics. These beliefs did not make him a grim fatalist. To the contrary, he was a cheerful, industrious, and kind-hearted man, reliably humble despite his fame. Though given to “good-natured sarcasm,” as a contemporary noted, and short-lived outbursts of temper, he was altogether one of the more attractive personalities in the history of mathematics. ……
Through the 1730s, Euler worked on various projects for the Russian state—notably in the areas of cartography and shipbuilding—while making his international reputation as a mathematician. These were unhappy years for Russia, with the country descending into state terror during the reign of Empress Anna (1730–40). “Common prudence forced [Euler] into an unbreakable habit of industry,” E. T. Bell writes, suggesting that Euler’s extraordinary productivity had its foundations in this period. Another biographer remarks, “In all of Euler’s vast correspondence there is no mention of politics.” His Russian experiences either inoculated Euler against politics or confirmed an innately apolitical disposition.
In 1733, after Daniel Bernoulli left Russia in disgust at the continuing political horrors, Euler was elevated to the St. Petersburg Academy’s chair of mathematics. Two years later, he made his name throughout Europe by solving the famous Basel Problem: finding a closed form—a precise value—for the infinite sum
The Basel problem had already defeated many of the top mathematicians of Euler’s time, including Jacob Bernoulli and Gottfried Leibniz, but Euler showed that the sum was π2/6. It was a striking result. π (pi) is, of course, a well-known geometric constant, the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. Mathematicians nowadays are accustomed to seeing it crop up in unexpected places, but in 1735 it seemed remarkable for such a geometric value to appear in the solution to a mathematical problem. It was Euler, by the way, who popularized the symbol π in its now-familiar usage.
(For further reading, please follow the link posted at the beginning.)
