Leonhard Euler's Letters to a German Princess

https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Extras/Euler_letters/

by thunderbong • 2 years ago

68 25 2 years ago

mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk

Havoc• 2 years ago

Was this part of a paid position? 200+ letters is a fair bit so presumably a formal education arrangement of sorts

OJFord• 2 years ago

Since they were published only eight years later, perhaps he already had that broader use in mind?

yorwba• 2 years ago

There's a paper that touches on the question https://arxiv.org/abs/1406.7417v1 and fails to give a definitive answer, but a formal arrangement to prepare her for her role as princess-abbess in Herford seems likely.

n4r9• 2 years ago

According to Wikipedia [0] he was engaged as her tutor. At this stage in his career he had been given a post in the Berlin Academy by the monarch of Prussia, so as long as he was publishing research he could probably spend quite a bit of time doing whatever took his fancy.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonhard_Euler#Berlin

sandworm101• 2 years ago

200 letters over two years seems excessive to us, but not so in centuries past. An educated person with a knowledge job could might expect to write a dozen letters a day. A regular correspondence with a royal, any royal, would bring a degree of notoriety. He would also expect his letters to be read by others in the household, making the correspondence more of a connection to the royal family as a whole than with an individual princess. (A princess's communications with a commoner man would have been under constant scrutiny, the relationship tightly regulated.)

bombcar• 2 years ago

It's closer to what we would call 200 blog posts, really, and a blog post every 3 days isn't going to raise anyones eyebrows.

peterfirefly2• 2 years ago

could might

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/double_modal

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/might_could#English

empath75• 2 years ago

I was just sort of thinking of it as a personalized KiwiCo Box for math facts.

coldcode• 2 years ago

Leonhard Euler discovered or was associated with so many mathematical/physics/etc concepts that people stopped naming them after him to keep from everything being Eulers'.

A 20th century mathematician with a similar problem was Paul Erdos.

JohnMakin• 2 years ago

What's also interesting is the existence of many profoundly gifted contemporaries in this same space of time, such as the Bernoulli's, Goldbach, LaGrange, just to name a few. He often corresponded with many of them as well.

Koshkin2• 2 years ago

True - none of my mathematics textbooks have the name 'Paul Erdős' mentioned in them.

nickdothutton• 2 years ago

Having studied Euler a little, I am at a loss to explain his work rate. Somehow I think such people are so far outside normal output for a human being and are under-explained. The guy could almost have been some other life-form wearing a disguise. JvN another of course.

achillesheels• 2 years ago

I love how unapologetic Euler is with his belief in soul. Pretty striking to be connecting soil with the nervous system!

mandibeet• 2 years ago

Also a philosopher who believed in the harmony between science and faith.

sevensor• 2 years ago

There's a charming transcription error in the first letter, substituting "fun" for sun, no doubt due to there having been a long s in the original.

Koshkin2• 2 years ago

... which is also the integral :)

bmacho• 2 years ago

No, actually that's not the case, the original letters are in French, and probably not even available anymore. They must have OCRed an old edition like this https://archive.org/details/lettersofeuleron01eule/page/n71/...

alangibson• 2 years ago

Anyone else's blood boil at a world historical genius being required to verbally bow and scrape before an adolescent that did nothing more significant that being born to noble parents?

delichon• 2 years ago

In the old patronage system you genuflected to aristocracy, in the new one, to bureaucracy.

mellosouls• 2 years ago

No.

Why do you think he was required to verbally bow and scrape? The sample letters here show nothing more than ornate politeness.

His brilliance was known in his own time and he was respected and established at court.

Whether he saw advantage in this connection for financial, social or purely altruistic reasons is debatable, but it is presumptive I think to declare subservience.

More exploration of the possible context and relationship between them here:

https://arxiv.org/abs/1406.7417v1

(Edit: paper also linked earlier in another comment in this thread)

ken47• 2 years ago

Blood boil? No.

Royalty commanded resources which Euler wanted to access, even if indirectly. In the modern world, geniuses have to do the same to e.g. gain funding. Maybe there is slightly more meritocracy now in determining who gains that level of power, but the improvement is not nearly as dramatic as you'd like to think. Nepotism is alive and well.

Leonhard Euler's Letters to a German Princess

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