Leonhard Euler: The first St. Petersburg years (1727--1741)
type: Item
instance of: scholarly article
title: Leonhard Euler: The first St. Petersburg years (1727--1741)
zbMATH Open document ID: 0856.01014
author: Ronald Calinger
published in: Historia Mathematica
publication date: 1997-02-17T00:00:00Z
review text: This long article contains a careful, well documented and pleasant presentation of the life and work of the young Euler in St. Petersburg. The author assumes that a full understanding of Euler's mathematics, including his motivations, his aesthetic sensibility, and the succession of problems he faced, depends, partly on knowing his interactions with the St. Petersburg and Berlin Academies and his correspondents, his encounters with reform absolutism, and his participation in Enlightenment literary and religious discourses. With this philosophy in mind the author primarily gives a global biographical information of Euler's first St. Petersburg years from 1727 to 1741. Then he probes the Bernoulli tutorial, the early academy and his personality. The third and fourth sections show Euler setting the ground work for his ambitious research program in number theory, infinitary analysis, and rational mechanics. The fifth section elucidates his thorough study of the operation of Newton's inverse-square law and preliminary rejection of Newtonian optics and Leibnizian-Wolffian monads. The sixth examines the cause and nature of his eyesight deterioration from 1735 and first details his negotiations to move to Berlin in 1741. Euler's mathematical contributions are well explained and inserted in a historical perspective. The paper disputes the conventional view that Goldbach chiefly investigated Euler's work in number theory and the myth enduring since Condorcet's Eloge that he virtually ignored practice for theory. 152 bibliographical references, 48 from Euler's Opera omnia, complete the paper.
reviewed by: Raffaella Franci
Mathematics Subject Classification ID: 01A50
Mathematics Subject Classification ID: 01A70
Mathematics Subject Classification ID: 01A74
zbMATH DE Number: 894942
zbMATH Keywords: Euler
zbMATH Keywords: Bernoulli
zbMATH Keywords: Hermann
zbMATH Keywords: Paris Academy of Sciences
zbMATH Keywords: St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences
zbMATH Keywords: number theory
zbMATH Keywords: infinitary analysis
zbMATH Keywords: rational mechanics
zbMATH Keywords: Newton's inverse-square law
zbMATH Keywords: Leibnizian-Wolffian monads
zbMATH Keywords: Goldbach
Wikidata QID: Q29398315
MaRDI profile type: Publication
full work available at URL: hmat.1996.0015
OpenAlex ID: W2037969357
DOI: 10.1006/HMAT.1996.0015
description: scientific article; zbMATH DE number 894942