In a piece in The Wilson Quarterly, to celebrate the tercentenary of Euler, John Derbyshire pays his tributes to Euler; the piece begins with a couple of stanzas of verse:
Without the Bard of Basel, Bell,
You’ve clearly dropped the ball.
Our votes are cast for Euler, L.
Whose Opera says it all.Six dozen volumes—what a feat!
Profound and deep throughout.
Does Leonhard rank with the elite?
Of this there is no doubt.
It goes on to describe the life and works of Euler in detail:
There never was a mathematician as productive as Euler. Math writer W. W. Rouse Ball computed that from 1736, when Euler began publishing regularly, to his death from a stroke in 1783,
there is for each and every fortnight in 47 years a separate effort of mathematical invention, digested, arranged, written in Latin, and amplified, often to a tedious extent, by corollaries and scholia. Through all this mass, the power of the inventor is almost uniformly distributed, and apparently without effort. There is nothing like this, except this, in the history of science.
Though it seems almost impertinent to emphasize any of the man’s contributions above others, probably most mathematicians would agree that Euler’s work in analysis advanced mathematics the furthest. It is here that his single most memorable result belongs. The famous Euler equation eiπ+1=0 manages to establish a correlation among five of the most important numbers (0, 1, i, e, and π—the last three all owe their symbols to Euler!) as well as among three key operations (addition, multiplication, and exponentiation).
And, ends with this appraisal of the man behind the mathematician:
All accounts of Euler’s life suggest that he was an admirable man, generous not only to his family and friends but to his critics and rivals as well. When a dispute arose over precedence in what is now known as the Euler-Maclaurin method for computing infinite sums, Euler wrote to a friend, “I have very little desire for anything to be detracted from the fame of the celebrated Mr. Maclaurin since he probably came upon the same theorem for summing series before me, and . . . deserves to be named as its first discoverer.”
That was Leonhard Euler: a mathematician of towering genius who lived nobly, calmly, cheerfully, and well. Perhaps his unassuming nature is one reason that the nonmathematical public does not better know his name. Let us hope this year’s tercentenary celebrations will put matters right.
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Hat Tip: A&L Daily
Tags: Leonard Euler
Entertaining Research 
October 6, 2007 at 3:24 am |
It is a nice article. Euler also recognized the many valuedness of logarithms and reslved an early controversiy between one of the Bernoullis and Leibnitz. He also seemed to have a facility for surprising formulae; I think that Bell says somewhere only Euler and Jacobi are probably the only mathematicians comparable to S. Ramanujan in that respect.
October 6, 2007 at 3:50 am |
I might have got it slightly wrong mixing up different passages from E.T. Bell’s “men of Mathematics”. On page 360, in the chapter on Jacobi, he says:”for sheer manipulative ability in tangled algebra Euiler and Jacobi have had no rival unless it be the Indian mathematical genius, Srinivasa Ramanujan, in our own cntury.”
On page 152, in the chapter on Euler,he says that Euler an algorist has never been surpassed. He goes on to say “It is fashionable to-day to dspise the’ mere algorist’; yet, when a truly great one likethe Hindu Ramanujan arrives unexpectedly out of nowhere, even expert analysts hail him as a gift from heaven: hia all but supernatural insight into apparently unrelated formulas reveals hidden trails leading from one territory to another, and the analysts have new tasks provided for them in clearing the trails. An algorist is a ‘formalist’ who loves beautiful formulas for their own sake”.
I do not know these areas well enough to really support Bell; I studied topology and geometric group theory.
October 6, 2007 at 4:55 am |
Dear Swarup,
Thanks for the comments; it had been long since I read E T Bell. However, I have read plenty of writings by Truesdell praising Euler; but being a mathematician with an interest in continuum mechanics, Truesdell confines himself to Euler’s writings on mechanics. See this short note on Truesdell’s Idiot’s fugitive essays (which, by the way, is lots of fun to read), for example:
In an era when most Euler scholarship was done in the Soviet Union and in the DDR, Truesdell kept the candle lit in the West, though his work and his personality were both controversial… This volume contains 42 “Fugitive essays”, about a third of which directly concern Euler, and more than half of the rest involving Euler indirectly…. the Fugitive Essays ought to be required reading for anyone trying to understand Euler. They are entertaining, opinionated, well informed and at times controversial.
January 28, 2009 at 12:49 am |
Despite his super talent, Ramanujan doesn’t come even close to Leonhard Euler. Ramanujan’s results are great, we must praise him for that, but he appeared late in the history of math and let’s admit that he wasn’t ahead of his time. To better sustain this statement,let’s remember Riemann, who was born way before Ramanujan. Riemann left behind him an unique mathematical treasury hard to challenge.
Don’t take me wrong, I appreciate Ramanujan great work, but I believe we should stay in touch with reality.
August 4, 2009 at 8:08 am |
Baloneea don’t be ridiculous. Ramanujan had barely any formalized training and relied mainly on intuition to derive his results. True Euler was a great algorist but he was more exposed to formalized learning than ramanujan. Hence, it is inherenlty assinine to even attempt a comparison on such a basis. Therefore your statement concerning Euler being “better” exists purely in the realm of opinion and not fact. Your statments concerning riemann are also unfortunate given the fact that ramanujan had a significantly shorter life-span.
October 7, 2010 at 11:56 am |
Ramanujan was the greatest algorist ever.he redisccovered Euler’s results without any awareness of their existence,had no training.he lived just 32 years,4 months and 4 days but in his lifetime went to such heights being from a disease prone area and had to rely on intuition a lot.he was never understood for his discoveries because he had no training.he is often let down by facts like he had no University education but people forget to see the other side that despite having no rigorous training he still had the talent for maniipulations and calculations which were way beyond even mathematicians understanding.i completely agree with Dujon Dunn Sir and am happy there is atleast somebody who appreciates Ramanujan’s genius.(one more reminder,Ramanujan lived just 32,Euler lived 79).see for yourself