Daniel Bernoulli
1700-1782
Swiss Mathematician and Physicist
Daniel Bernoulli belongs to that rarefied upper echelon of mathematicians and scientists for whom distinctions between disciplines are largely academic. Trained as a mathematician, he is best known for the application ofhis ideas to physics as expressed in Bernoulli's principle, which concerns the inverse relationship of pressure and velocity in fluids. Numerous and groundbreaking as his contributions in the field of hydrodynamics were, however, these were far from the full range of the discoveries made by a genius whose work explored realms as diverse as probability, medicine, and music.
Daniel Bernoulli. (Corbis Corporation. Reproduced with permission.)Throughout his life, Bernoulli would be locked in competition with his father Johann (1667-1748), professor of mathematics at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands when Bernoulli was born. As he became aware of his second son's great talents, Johann would become increasingly jealous; yet the Bernoulli family, whose native land was Switzerland, was filled with men of distinction. Johann's brother Jakob (1654-1705) held the chair of mathematics at the University of Basel, a position Johann took over when Daniel was five.
As he progressed with his education, Daniel demonstrated abilities that made him a standout even within the Bernoulli family. At age 16, he had already earned a master's degree, which so inflamed Johann's jealousy that he forbade his son from a career in the sciences. The closest Daniel could come to a scientific career was to study medicine, and there too he excelled. His first love was mathematics, however, and he continued to study the subject in Italy during the early 1720s. He gained his first fame in 1724, with the publication of Exercitationes quaedam mathematicae, which contained his first discussions in the areas of probability and fluid motion—areas in which he was destined to make his most lasting impact.
On the strength of this widely recognized publication, Bernoulli received an appointment to the St. Petersburg Academy in Russia, where he was joined by his brother Nikolaus (1695-1726). More honors were to follow, as in 1725 he won the first of nine prizes from the French Académie Royale des Sciences. While in St. Petersburg, Bernoulli produced important studies in the field of probability, and began a correspondence with his distinguished compatriot Leonhard Euler (1707-1783). Eventually he grew homesick, and in 1737 accepted a professorship in botany—a subject of limited interest to him—simply because it would give him an opportunity to return to Basel.
Back in Switzerland, Bernoulli devoted himself to a wide array of undertakings, the most notable of which was Hydrodynamica, published in 1738. (Ever jealous, Johann later published his own Hydraulica, which he retroactively dated to 1732 and in which he appropriated many of his son's discoveries as his own.) Hydrodynamica contains Bernoulli's principle, which states that the pressure of a fluid decreases as its velocity increases. Also in Hydrodynamica, Bernoulli confirmed Boyle's law on the inverse relationship of pressure and volume; and by relating the ideas of pressure, motion, and temperature, he laid the foundations for the kinetic theory of gases that would emerge in the following century.
Bernoulli became a professor of physiology in 1743, and seven years later was appointed to the chair of natural philosophy, or physics, in Basel. He remained in that position until his retirement in 1776, and during those years continued to develop his seminal ideas on kinetic energy—then called vis viva, or "living force." He also conducted a number of musical experiments, calculating frequencies and demonstrating the relationship between mathematics and music. Bernoulli died in Basel on March 17, 1782.
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