Leonhard Euler Facts
Leonhard Euler Facts
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| Interesting Leonhard Euler Facts: |
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| Despite his Swiss birth, Euler spent much of his adulthood in St. Petersburg, Russia, and in Berlin, Prussia. |
| Euler introduced much of the mathematical terminology and notation that are still in use today, especially in mathematical analysis. One of these systems was mathematical function. |
| He is also widely remembered for his contributions in mechanics, fluid dynamics, optics, astronomy, and music. |
| Euler is remembered as the most important mathematician of the 18th century, as well as one of the greatest mathematicians who ever lived. |
| Pierre-Simon Laplace expressed Euler's importance to mathematics: "Read Euler, read Euler, he is the master of us all." |
| He is also one of the most prolific scholars and thinkers in the field of math, as his writings fill sixty to eighty quarto volumes. |
| Euler's father was friends with Johann Bernoulli, who at that time was thought of as Europe's foremost mathematician. |
| Bernoulli would grow to become the most influential figure in Euler's life. |
| Euler's Master's thesis was on a comparison between the philosophies of Newton and Descartes, while he still tutored under Bernoulli in math. |
| A later thesis by Euler was on the propagation of sound. |
| At the age of twenty, he received second prize in the annual Paris Academy Prize Problem, a competition who went on to win twelve times. |
| After Bernoulli convinced Euler's father to let him abandon studying to become a pastor, he went on to make important contributions to nearly all areas of math, including geometry, infinitesimal calculus, trigonometry, algebra, and number theory. |
| In science, Euler wrote extensively on ideas in continuum physics, lunar theory and other areas. |
| Euler has two numbers named after him. |
| The first is the Euler's Number in calculus, represented simply as e, which has an approximate value of 2.71828. |
| The second is the Euler-Mascheroni Constant γ (gamma), which is often referred to simply as "Euler's constant;" it has an approximate value of 0.57721. |
| He may be most well known for his various notations systems, many of which are still used in textbooks today. |
| Of all of his notations, Euler's most important may be the idea of the function, as he was the first mathematician to designate the function by writing it f(x). |
| In trigonometry, Euler was the first researcher to introduce a written system for the trigonometric functions using the letter e (now named after him) as the base. |
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