Encounters between Robins, and Euler and the Bernoullis; artillery and related subjects (Q1206049)

Benjamin Robins' (1707-1751) writing ``New Principles of Gunnery'' was published in 1742. In 1745 Euler brought out his own book in German, on ``The New Principles of Artillery'', which contained a translation of Robins' book with sections containing ``Anmerkungen'' which brought it up to several times the length of Robins' own book. In 1777 appeared the English translation of it . C. A. Truesdell concludes in 1954, that ``... Euler's great treatise on ballistics --- for the annotations which he added to his translation of Robins' little budget of rules, experiments and guesses transformed it into the first scientific work on gunnery.'' The author of this article does not agree with this statement and stresses the importance of Robins' work. The aim of this paper is to make some of the details of the interaction between Robins, Euler and the Bernoullis better known.