1707-1783

Swiss Mathematician

The mathematician Leonhard Euler (pronounced "oiler") was one of the great geniuses of his age, a thinker who explored virtually every known area of his chosen field. Nearly 900 books and papers are attributed to him, many of them written in the last 17 years of his life, when he was completely blind. (Euler had been blind in one eye for the preceding 31 years.) His interests ranged from analytic geometry to differential and integral calculus to the calculus of variations. Like many mathematicians of his day, his work also involved questions of applied mathematics: on the day he died, Euler had just finished calculating the orbit of the recently discovered planet Uranus.

Born in Basel, Switzerland, on April 17, 1707, the future mathematician was the son of Paul, a Calvinist pastor, and Marguerite Brucker Euler. Soon after his birth, the family moved to the town of Reichen...