The Bernoullis of Basel (Q1126457)

The author offers several remarks on the Bernoulli family, stresses the importance of Daniel Bernoulli's original work on utility theory and comments on his treatment of observations. He falsely accuses three authors (including the reviewer) of ``confusing'' the chronology of Daniel's two contributions on the last subject and argues that the method of maximal likelihood (rejected by Gauss in 1823) is conceptually preferable to posterior weighing of observations. His reference to the reviewer's paper on Daniel Bernoulli is undecipherable. The author mentions Euler's note on Daniel's treatment of observations and has nothing positive to say about it; from 1986 onward, he avoids commenting on the reviewer's discovery of Euler's anticipation of least squares.