Tuesday, September 12, 2006

Euler (again)


So what dirt was Mira able to find about the man on the ten-franc note? I work with a man whose first name is Euler. He pronounces it "Yuler", not "Oiler", perhaps because he is Phillipino.

3 comments:

JimPreston said...

I hadn't seen any earlier discussion of Euler. One math joke is that most theorems are named after the second person who discovered them, since otherwise everything would be called "Euler's theorem".

J Blood said...

See Jimmy's April 12 posting.

JimPreston said...

I'm very sorry to have missed the earlier Euler thread. The 'e', is, the second most important number in math. Zero being the first, of course.

Euler is said to have looked over his father's shoulder and made a correction to some accounting at age 2. Later in life, he had many children himself, and was reportedly able to do his theoretical work with the children climbing on him. I don't know if he ever received the honor that Archimedes did, in which the king proclaimed that "if Archimedes said it, then it is true."