Léonard Euler et ses amis

Abstract

THIS is a short sketch of the life and work of Euler. In little more than 100 pages it gives us an interesting account of his early life, his first sojourn at St. Petersburg (1727–1741), his call to Berlin by Frederick the Great, when, soon after his accession, that monarch planned the formation of a new Prussian Academy and was collecting about Mm the men who were to set it going, among them Wolff, Maupertuis, Algarotti and Euler (“le grand algebriste,” as Frederick called him in his letter to Suhm of June 14, 1740); his part in the formation and working of the Nouvelle Societe Litteraire, afterwards combined with the Soci6t6 des Sciences founded by Leibniz into L'Academie Royale des Sciences et Belles-Lettres de Prusse; the years of his co-operation, as director of the mathematical class, member of the directorate, and member of the literary committee, with Maupertuis the director of the Academy, and of his sole direction of the Academy while Maupertuis was in France recruiting his health; his relations with Frederick, and the circumstances in which, after the accession of Catherine the Great to the throne of Russia, he overcame the resistance of Frederick and returned (in May 1766) to the directorship of the Academie des Sciences de St-Petersbourg, with which he had all along maintained his connexion; and lastly, his second stay at St. Petersburg, including the period of his total blindness from 1772 until he died of apoplexy on Sept. 7,1783, while still in full possession of his intellectual powers and in the midst of labours never interrupted (he is said, between 1773 and 1782, to have written no fewer than 355 memoirs).

Léonard Euler et ses amis.

Par Prof. L.-Gustave Du Pasquier. Pp. ix + 125. (Paris: J. Hermann, 1927.) 22 francs.