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eighteenth century (His closest competitor for that title is Lagrange) and one of the
most prolific of all time; his publication list of 886 papers and books may be
exceeded only by Paul Erds. Euler's complete works fill about 90 volumes.
Remarkably, much of this output dates from the the last two decades of his life,
when he was totally blind.
Euler's important contributions were so numerous that terms like "Euler's formula"
or "Euler's theorem" can mean many different things depending on context. Just in
mechanics, one has Euler angles (to specify the orientation of a rigid body), Euler's
theorem (that every rotation has an axis), Euler's equations for motion of fluids,
and the Euler-Lagrange equation (that comes from calculus of variations). The
"Euler's formula" with which most American calculus students are familiar defines
the exponentials of imaginary numbers in terms of trigonometric functions. But
there is another "Euler's formula" that (to use the modern terminology adopted long
after Euler's death) gives the values of the Riemann zeta function at positive even
integers in terms of Bernoulli numbers. There are both Euler numbers and Eulerian
numbers, and they aren't the same thing. Euler's study of the bridges of Knigsberg
can be seen as the beginning of combinatorial topology (which is why the Euler
characteristic bears his name).
Though born and educated in Basel, Switzerland, Euler spent most of his career in
St. Petersburg and Berlin. He joined the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences in
1727. In 1741 he went to Berlin at the invitation of Frederick the Great, but he and
Frederick never got on well and in 1766 he returned to St. Petersburg, where he
remained until his death. Euler's prolific output caused a tremendous problem of
backlog: the St. Petersburg Academy continued publishing his work posthumously
for more than 30 years. Euler married twice and had 13 children, though all but
five of them died young.
Euler's powers of memory and concentration were legendary. He could recite the
entire Aeneid word-for-word. He was not troubled by interruptions or distractions;
in fact, he did much of his work with his young children playing at his feet. He was
able to do prodigious calculations in his head, a necessity after he went blind. The
contemporary French mathematician Condorcet tells the story of two of Euler's
students who had independently summed seventeen terms of a complicated infinite
series, only to disagree in the fiftieth decimal place; Euler settled the dispute by
recomputing the sum in his head.
In publishing his work, Gauss followed the motto Pauca sed matura (Few, but
ripe) which appeared on his seal. Gauss would not publish a result until it was
complete and he was entirely satisfied with its presentation; consequently,
much of his work was unpublished with a considerable amount discovered
only after his death. Gauss' writing style was terse, polished, and devoid of
motivation. Abel said, `He is like the fox, who effaces his tracks in the sand
with his tail'. Gauss, in defense of his style, said, `no self-respecting architect
leaves the scaffolding in place after completing the building'. The quantity and
depth of Gauss' unpublished work sometimes led to unpleasant consequences.
When Gauss' lifelong friend Farkas Bolyai wrote to Gauss for an opinion on
his son Janos's work on non-Euclidean geometry, Gauss wrote that it was fine
work, but he could not praise it, for this would be self-praise since he had
developed a similar theory years before; Janos was crestfallen and gave up
mathematics as a career. Today Gauss, Bolyai, and Lobachevsky are
considered co-discoverers of non-Euclidean geometry. A similar incident
occurred with Jacobi over the theory of elliptic functions; Gauss also had
prediscovered work of Abel and Cauchy, including Cauchy's integral theorem.
Gauss could be a stern, demanding individual, and it is reported that this
resulted in friction with two of his sons that caused them to leave Germany
and come to the United States; they settled in the midwest and have
descendants throughout the plains states. I was living in Greeley, Colorado,
when I read this in 1972; looking in the phone book, I found a listing for a
Charlotte Gauss living two blocks from my apartment! After considerable
internal debate, I called her and found that she was indeed related to Gauss.
My wife, Paulette, and I visited several times with Charlotte and her sister
Helen; they were bright, alert, and charming young women, ages 93 and 94,
respectively. Their father, Gauss' grandson, had been a Methodist missionary
to the region, and he had felt it unseemly to take pride in his famous ancestor
(maybe there were some remnants of his father's feelings on leaving
Germany); they were nevertheless happy to talk Gauss and their family. They
showed us a baby spoon which their father had made out of a gold medal
awarded to Gauss, some family papers, and a short biography of Gauss
written by an aunt. I vividly remember Helen describing the reaction of one of
her math teachers when he discovered he had a real, live, Gauss in his class.
On 3rd June 1862 he married Elise Koch of Krchov, and they had a daughter. But in June
1862 he suffered a attack of pleuritis from which he never really recovered. He spent his last
years in Italy and Goettingen. He found financial support to stay in Italy, where he visited
Italian mathematicians, for example Betti, who he had met in Gttingen. In June 1866 he
made his last trip to the Lago Maggiore, where he died fully conscious in 20st July and left a
paper on natural philosophy unfinished.
He was member of the Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften, the Bavarian and Parisian Academy
and the London Royal Academy. [Mathematische Werke, p 509-526] Euclid is one of the
world's most famous mathematicians, yet very little is known of his life, except
that he taught at Ptolemys university at Alexandria, Egypt. Euclid's Elements, a
work on elementary geometry and other topics, exceeded other works of its time,
which are now known only by indirect reference. The Elements begins with
definitions, postulates, and axioms, including the famous fifth, or parallel,
postulate that one and only one line can be drawn through a point parallel to a
given line. Euclid's decision to make this postulate not demonstrable assumption
led to Euclidean geometry. It was not until the 19th century that the fifth postulate
was modified in order to develop non-Euclidean geometry.
The Elements are divided into 13 books. The first 6 are on geometry; 7, 8 and 9 are
on number theory; and book number 10 is on Eudoxus's theory of irrational
numbers. Books 11, 12, and 13 all concern solid geometry, and end with a
discussion of the properties of the five regular polyhedrons and proof that there can
only be these five. Euclid's Elements are remarkable for the clarity with which the
theorems and problems are selected and ordered. The propositions proceed
logically and concisely, with very few assumptions.
Euclid is not known to have made any original discoveries, and the Elements is
based on the work of the people before him, like Exodus, Thales, Hippocrates, and
Pythagoras. It is accepted that some of the proofs are his own and that the excellent
arrangement is his. Over a thousand editions of the work have been published since
the first printed version of 1482. Euclid's other works include Data, On Divisions