Leonhard Euler And His Friends: Leonhard Euler: Switzerland's Great Scientific Expatriate

Bad translation that looks like it was not reviewed by an editor. Many sentences don’t even make sense. Full of typos and spelling mistakes as well as atrocious punctuation. The typesetting is haphazard etc., etc.

Euler and His Friends is one of the few biographies written about Leonhard Euler. It was written in chronological form by Louis-Gustave Du Pasquier, published in 1927, and now translated into English for the first time by John S.D. Glaus. Euler was one of the great mathematicians and scientists of the eighteenth century and arguably one of the five greatest the world has ever known. While it is true that his name deserves the ubiquity of a `Newton' or `Einstein', Euler's legacy is as vast as it is unattributed.Written and translated in part to broaden Euler's brand and appeal, Du Pasquier's biography aptly reveals the span of Euler's personal and professional development by strategically using Euler-centered vignettes of many of his famous friends, colleagues, and autocrats. Each of these persuasively revisits a central question: Why do we not know more about this man given how much we know about his friends? Indeed, two of the reasons that Du Pasquier offers as to why Frederick II did not value and failed to recognize Euler may be true for modern culture as well. He writes, "The first was [the] inability to comprehend mathematics and the prejudice that [modern culture] displays towards anyone who dedicated themselves uniquely to its development. Secondly, in spite of his great learning, Euler fell foul...because of his inability to conduct any light, spirited conversation that [modern culture] admires amongst the literati."Euler's professional life is a testament to how much more integrated were the realms of academia compared to today. In addition to his specializations in mathematics and the sciences, Euler was competent and versatile enough to be considered for academic chairs and positions in anatomy, botany, medicine, philosophy, and logic. I found this distinction to be quite intriguing; today's scientists and artists and philosophers are so quick to assert their field as dominant and in exclusion of all others.Apart from scholars and students of the history of mathematics, general readers that are avid followers of the debate over whether Newton or Leibniz invented calculus will find a treasure in this book. A substantial part of Euler's career took place during the aftermath of this controversial debate and his monumental contributions to differential and integral calculus were largely overshadowed and underappreciated because of it. Furthermore, if nothing else, this book serves as a case study into the political and social environments and pressures that crept into the Russian and Prussian academies and how the boons and banes of royal patronage affected a great scientist's work.Through extensive study, this book successfully attempts to portray the societal pressures and intriguing relationships that Euler developed and how he shaped and was shaped by them in his personal and professional life. While only a small niche of Western readers know much about Euler's life and works, our world is suffused with the fruits that his mathematical and scientific genius pioneered. From his contributions to the philosophy of science, pure and applied mathematics, optics, naval architecture and engineering, hydrodynamics, and astronomy, we are so immersed in his legacy that it is no surprise how little we are aware of it.