Leonhard Euler's use and understanding of mathematical transcendence (Q452112): Difference between revisions

This account addresses one of the challenging aspects of an historical understanding of Euler's work, namely attributing to him the discovery of transcendental numbers. The author makes the point that Euler used and understood mathematical transcendence differently from the later nineteenth-century mathematicians such as Joseph Liouville, Charles Hermite, and Ferdinand von Lindemann. For one thing, eighteenth-century mathematical definitions such as Euler's were intended to be (possibly incomplete) descriptions of an a priori object rather than prescriptions that constituted the object. Complex numbers, for example, were absent from his definition of determined quantities. Similarly Euler refers only to transcendental `quantities' since such non-algebraically generated entities he did not regard as numbers. For Euler such transcendental quantities, the author proposes, were to be understood as inheriting their transcendence from transcendental functions, rather than defined through an appeal to ``difficult mathematics or relying on `questionable' infinities or infinitesimals''.