Perhaps the best known is that he was able to recite Virgil’s Aeneid from beginning to end, detailing in what line every page of the edition he owned began and ended. After his death, his obituary required 56 pages to list all his publications.īut even the numbers fall short in describing a prodigious mind whose talent manifested itself in some anecdotes. It has been estimated that almost a third of all the science and mathematics written in the eighteenth century bears his signature.
The numbers serve to demonstrate his incredible mental superpowers-over his 76 years of life he published more than 800 works, totalling some 30,000 pages. The Swiss Leonhard Euler (15 April 1707 – 18 September 1783) was one of the greatest intellectual supermen in the history of mankind. But these are but one particular case of those invented by a mathematician whose name designates constants, functions, equations, laws, theorems, and almost any other type of mathematical entity: Euler.
But above those of Newton, Galileo, or Einstein, there is one name that probably surpasses them all as the first to appear-once children master the four basic arithmetic operations, their approach to logic begins with set theory and its Venn diagrams. In the educational studies of every scientist, there are a few individual names that seem to emerge from course to course.
