Leonhard Euler: The first St. Petersburg years (1727--1741) (Q1915875)

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.