Thank you for this great talk. I loved math in school and college, and sure wish my teachers had had the time to portrait the people behind all the theory. School mathematics depicts only the final result of theory, not how people came up with it, made mistakes, how amazing the idea was at the time, etc. We take it all for granted and talks like this make it all come to life. Thanks!
Excellent! I have Prof Dunham's "Euler: Master of Us All" from the AMA. It's a great read and explains all the great discoveries explained in this lecture. Perfect companion for those who want "the other half", focusing on the actual mathematics.
The end's excitingly fascinating, brought brightly and nimbly through laughter and enchantment by an apparently magnificent and wonderful Professor. :) Such moments and experiences make me admire and love math even more than I already do - using passion, logicalness and simplicity, the greatest mathematical discoveries and breakthroughs were made along human history.
ehhh the number e wasn't Euler's creation =P. "Euler was not the inventor of the number e, even though he gave mathematicians the symbol e. The existence of e is implicit in John Napier's 1614 work on logarithms, and natural logarithms are sometimes inexactly dubbed Napierian logarithms. The constant 2.71828 . . . was referred to in Edward Wright's English translation of Napier's work in 1618."
@oker59 It's kind of surprising that Dunham doesn't question or wonder why Leonard Euler didn't think of George Cantor's transfinite numbers since Mr Dunham knows that Euler studies with the Bernouli's; Johan Bernouli(spelling?) discovered an aspect of infinit sets in his solution of the harmonic series. Euler almost certainly would have known about this result. In fact William Dunham points out that the Bernouli's can't solve the next logical series problem; Euler as Mr Dunam points out .
well, I know that William cannot account for and describe everything that Leonard Euler(seems to me that he gives more of the little mind teaser type of things Leonard did than most of his significant analyses; it's like just the little tidbits can blow the minds of us lowly non-mathematicians!); but, I know of one thing that Leonard Euler actually messed up that I think is particularly significant; he missed discovering Fourier analyses;
@oker59 I point these things out just to point out that different people solve different problems no matter who you are; quantity doesn't necessarilly matter.
Euler didn't think of non-euclidean geometries; if he had, he could have wrote books on that alone. He didn't come up with Elliptic functions; imagine what he could have done with that. He didn't come up with the fundamental theorem of algebra(Gauss did). Euler didn't think of dedekind cuts which you would think he could have done. He didn't do Cantor's transfinite numbers even though Galileo gave more than a clue to transfinite numbers. He didn't come up with Galois theory.
I'd like to further note about Leonard Euler being 1) I guess you could say a god believer, and 2) a calvinist. Well, Archimedes laughed at Aristarches sun centered cosmology; the point is that not only the smartest amongst us can make mistakes, but even some stuff that is not so hard to discover.
