A Tribute to Euler by William Dunham

Koehler Professor of Mathematics, remarkable because of his Swiss— i.e., landlocked—

Muhlenberg College upbringing. (He would win the Academy’s first prize
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a dozen times over the course of his career.)

Visiting Professor of Mathematics, On the heels of this success, Euler applied for a
Harvard University faculty position at his alma mater. To his dismay,
the job went to Benedict Staehelin, an individual
With acclaim normally reserved for matinee who thereby earned the distinction of being perhaps
idols, Leonhard Euler has recently been basking the worst hiring choice in history.  But Euler’s
in the mathematical limelight. The cause of fortunes improved with an offer from the St.
this spike in publicity was his tercentenary. Petersburg Academy in Russia. His appointment
Euler was born in Switzerland in 1707, and came through the influence of Daniel Bernoulli, son of
thus 2007 provided the perfect Johann, who had himself secured
opportunity for mathematicians a position at St. Petersburg a few
to celebrate his life and work. years before.
Discussions, conferences, and
special events were held in And so Euler bade farewell to
his honor. The Mathematical Switzerland and moved to St.
Association of America published Petersburg in 1727. He stayed
not one, not two, but five books until 1741 when he accepted a
about his remarkable career. And, call to the rival Berlin Academy.
in October of 2008 (“tercentenary There he worked under Frederick
plus one”), Euler was the subject the Great until friction between
of my Clay Public Lecture at them proved too much. Euler
Harvard University.     His story, in returned to St. Petersburg in
both its personal and scholarly 1766, where he remained until
dimensions, is one of the great tales his death in 1783.
from the history of mathematics.
Leonhard Euler (1707—1783) It was during his first Russian
As a youth, Euler showed such signs of genius that stint that he married Katharina Gsell, and the Eulers
he was mentored by Johann Bernoulli, who was would eventually have 13 children. However, child
then on the faculty at the University of Basel. Euler mortality took a dreadful toll in those days, and only
would later recall his sessions with the illustrious five of their children would survive to adolescence.
Bernoulli as an exciting, if daunting, experience. The accompanying sorrow defies comprehension.
For his part, Johann recognized the special talent
of his young student. Indeed, Bernoulli—a person Meanwhile, Euler faced a physical challenge of his
not naturally self-effacing—would later write these own. By his early 30s, he had lost vision in his right
laudatory words to Euler: “I present higher analysis eye. A modern diagnosis, insofar as such a thing
as it was in its childhood, but you are bringing it to is possible, attributes this to an ocular infection
man’s estate.” that was untreatable at the time. Visual limitations
aside, Euler continued his research unabated and
When he was 15, Euler graduated from the University maintained his productivity up to the year 1771,
of Basel, and by the age of 20 he had won a prize when he lost sight in his other eye. This was due to
from the Paris Academy. In those days, the Academy a cataract. Such a malady, easily corrected today,
would challenge the mathematicians of Europe with was a most serious matter back then. Euler’s doctors
specific, and often quite difficult, problems. In tried eye surgery to save his vision (and no one wants
this instance, the problem required a mathematical to contemplate the horrors of eye surgery in the 18th
analysis of the placement of masts on a sailing century), but the procedure was unsuccessful. By
ship. Euler’s submission received what amounted 1771, Euler was essentially blind.
to a second prize, an achievement all the more
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It is tempting to conclude that this marked the end “universal.” Consider the following dichotomies:
of his career, but Euler would not be stopped. He
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instructed his assistants to read aloud the newly Pure/Applied: Euler, of course, made innumerable
arrived books and journals, and he in turn dictated contributions to pure mathematics, but he was also
his ideas to a tableful of scribes working furiously the leading applied mathematician of his day. In fact,
to keep up. It is said that Euler could create a good half of those 75 volumes of the Opera Omnia
mathematics faster than most people can write it, treat subjects like mechanics, acoustics, and optics
and he daily put his assistants to the test. A case in —subjects that are today classified under physics or
point: in 1775, when he was blind, he produced a applied math.
paper a week! Like Beethoven, who wrote music
that he never heard, Euler created mathematics that Continuous/Discrete: Euler was as comfortable
he never saw. This triumph in the face of adversity working in the continuous realm (e.g., calculus and
makes Euler’s the most inspirational story in the differential equations) as he was working in the
history of mathematics. discrete one (e.g., number theory and combinatorics).
Such breadth has become a rarity in our age of
Such a biography, although compelling, might be specialization.
forgotten had the results he produced been of minor
interest. But nothing could be further from the truth. Advanced/Elementary:  Euler certainly contributed
If one measures a mathematician’s impact along the to the advanced mathematics of his time, but he was
three “axes” of quantity, diversity, and significance, also successful writing about elementary topics. For
then Euler is pretty much off the charts on all three. instance, in 1738 he published his Rechenkunst, an
Let me address each in turn. arithmetic text for the schools, and his best-selling
work of all was Letters to a German Princess of 1768,
In terms of quantity, Euler has no peer. Indeed, a a survey of popular science written for the layperson.
major challenge for those who sought to publish his
collected works was the “simple” task of locating Old/New: Euler made some remarkable discoveries
them all. This was complicated by the fact that in the venerable subject of plane geometry,
Euler published 228 papers after he died, making discoveries that would have been accessible to old
the deceased Euler one of history’s most prolific Euclid himself. Yet Euler also worked in fields so
mathematicians. new that he was making them up as he went along.

In any case, by the dawn of the 20th century, the But quantity and diversity do not fully account
scholar Gustav Eneström had identified a total of 866 for Euler’s mathematical reputation. There is one
books and papers that Euler produced over his long additional dimension of excellence that is surely
career. Eneström briefly described each of these in the greatest of all: the significance of his work. It is
a catalogue that itself ran to 388 pages. With this remarkable how many seminal ideas in our discipline
massive document as its guide, the Swiss Academy can be traced back to him. Consider, for instance:
of Sciences began publishing Euler’s collected works
—his Opera Omnia—in 1911, when the first hefty The concept of function.  It was Euler who
volume appeared. Thereafter, the books kept coming elevated the “function” into its starring role in
and coming … and coming. At the moment, there are analysis. Prior to that, people had applied calculus
75 volumes in print, totaling over 25,000 pages, but to the “curve,” a quasi-precise idea rooted in, and
the project is not yet complete. By the time all of the limited by, geometrical understanding. In his classic
papers and letters and notebooks are in print, Euler will 1748 text, Introductio in Analysin Infinitorum, Euler
have kept his publishers busy for more than a century. emphasized functions and introduced the special
There is nothing else like this in all of mathematics. types—polynomial, exponential, logarithmic, trigo-
nometric, and inverse trigonometric—that still
In terms of its diversity, Euler’s work covers a occupy center stage in analysis.
range of subject matter that can only be described as

2008 15
 A Tribute to Euler by William Dunham

to Book IX of the Elements, where Euclid had

demonstrated that a whole number will be perfect
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(i.e., the sum of its proper divisors) if it is of the form

Euler Identity from his 1748 classic Introductio N = 2k-1 (2k – 1), where the rightmost factor is prime.
in Analysin Infinitorum There matters stood for two millennia until Euler
proved that this sufficient condition is also necessary
The Euler Identity.  It was Euler who gave us the for an even number to be perfect. Taken together,
formula eix = cos x + i  sin  x. Those who encounter these results characterize even perfect numbers in
this for the first time are apt to regard it as a typo, the so-called “Euclid-Euler theorem,” surely one of
so peculiar is its fusion of the exponential and the the most illustrious hyphenations in the history of
trigonometric, the real and complex. It was from mathematics. (By the way, Euler suggested that the
this that Euler deduced such strange consequences matter of odd perfect numbers was likely to be “most
difficult”—an indisputably accurate assessment.)
as , about which the Harvard mathe-
The Euler Product-Sum Formula. In 1737, Euler
matician Benjamin Peirce is reported to have said,
“Gentlemen, we have not the slightest idea of what proved that , where the
this equation means, but we may be certain that it
means something very important.” product on the right is taken over all the primes.
Of course, he was here equating a divergent
The Euler Polyhedral Formula. In a 1752 study series (the harmonic) with a divergent product,
of polyhedra, Euler observed that V + F = E + 2, so one might dismiss it as so much drivel.
where V is the number of vertices, F is the number of But Euler saw how to exploit his formula to
faces, and E is the number of edges of a solid figure.
Because of the utter simplicity of this relationship, establish the divergence of .
Euler confessed that, “I find it surprising that these
general results in solid geometry have not previously
been noticed by anyone, so far as I am aware. ” Of This non-trivial theorem, which employed
course, no previous mathematician had had Euler’s techniques of analysis to attack questions of number
penetrating insight. theory, prompted the 20th century mathematician
André Weil to comment, “One may well regard
The Basel Problem. In the late 17th century, these investigations as marking the birth of analytic
Jakob Bernoulli had challenged the mathematical number theory.”
community to find the exact sum of the infinite
Such spectacular results notwithstanding, we have
barely scratched the surface. Consider this partial list
series . This remained an open question
of other Eulerian “hits”: The Bridges of Königsberg
(1736); the original partitioning theorem for whole
for a generation until Euler, then a young and still numbers (1740); the Euler line of a triangle (1767);
relatively unknown mathematician, stunned the the first textbook on the calculus of variations
world by finding the sum to be π2/6. As much as (1744); the analysis of Greco-Latin squares (1782);
anything, this discovery made Euler famous. the landmark study of continued fractions (1744);
the gamma function (1729); and the influential
The Euclid-Euler Theorem. Four volumes of the mechanics text of 1736 that cast Newton’s physics
Opera Omnia address the theory of numbers, and in the language of Leibniz’s calculus.
Euler made untold contributions to this ancient
and challenging field. One of these harks back

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Other pertinent texts (in English):
Emil Fellmann, Leonhard Euler, (trans., E. and W.
Gautschi), Birkhauser, 2007.
 
Andreas and Alice Heyne, Leonhard Euler: A
Man to be Reckoned With, Birkhauser, 2007. [This
is the “Euler Comic Book” I mentioned in the
lecture.  It’s actually pretty good!]
Euler product-sum formula from his 1748 classic
Introductio in Analysin Infinitorum Euler in translation:  Leonhard Euler, Introduction
to Analysis of the Infinite (2 vols.), (trans. John
And, as if these achievements were not enough, there Blanton), Springer-Verlag, 1988.
are some downright quirky results scattered among Leonhard Euler, Foundations of Differential Calculus,
his papers. For instance, he sought four different (trans. John Blanton) Springer-Verlag, 2000.
whole numbers, the sum of any pair of which is
a perfect square. (If you think this is easy, try it.) Leonhard Euler, Elements of Algebra, (trans. John
Euler came up with this fearsome foursome: 18530, Hewlett), Springer-Verlag, 1840 (reprint).
38114, 45986, and 65570.
Surveys:
From all of this, it should be clear why I chose to
focus my Clay Public Lecture on Euler and his Edward Sandifer, The Early Mathematics of
triumphs (those interested can find a video of the Leonhard Euler, MAA, 2007.
talk at www.claymath.org/video). It should be Edward Sandifer, How Euler Did It, MAA, 2007.
equally clear why the mathematical community so
enthusiastically celebrated Euler’s 300th birthday. William Dunham, Euler: The Master of Us All,
For, if anyone stands as the mathematical counterpart MAA, 1999.
of Shakespeare or Rembrandt or Bach, it is the William Dunham (ed.), The Genius of Euler, MAA,
incomparable master, Leonhard Euler. 2007.

The Mathematical Association of America named William Dunham

as the recipient of the 2008 Beckenbach Book Prize for Euler: The
Master of Us All, MAA, 1999.

“Mathematician William Dunham has written a superb book about the

life and amazing achievements of one of the greatest mathematicians
of all time. Unlike earlier writings about Euler, Professor Dunham
gives crystal clear accounts of how Euler ingeniously proved his most
significant results, and how later experts have stood on Euler’s broad
shoulders. Such a book has long been overdue. It will not need to be
done again for a long long time.” —Martin Gardner

“William Dunham has done it again! In Euler: The Master of Us

All, he has produced a masterful portrait of one of the most fertile
mathematicians of all time. With Dunham’s beautiful clarity and wit,
we can follow with amazement Euler’s strokes of genius which laid
the groundwork for most of the mathematics we have today.”
—Ron Graham, Chief Scientist, AT&T

Euler the Master of Us All is available through the MAA at the

following website: www.maa.org.

2008 17