Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by waivek 2658 days ago
A good snippet to come back to whenever one needs to be humbled:

Euler's work touched upon so many fields that he is often the earliest written reference on a given matter. In an effort to avoid naming everything after Euler, some discoveries and theorems are attributed to the first person to have proved them after Euler.

3 comments

There’s some of the same phenomenon going on with Gauss, as well. Not coincidentally, Gauss was probably the last person who truly understood all of mathematics, as it was known in his time.
If you think that might make you humbled, then consider that he was completely blind at the end of his life and he was still coming up with new discoveries and conversing with other mathematicians via scribes.
And raised, with limited success, 13 kids.
There should be acknowledgement that so much was initiated by his work. Perhaps via xxx-Euler's formula or something.

    ~> p | egrep 'Euler[-–][^ ]+' | sort
    Euler–Bernoulli beam equation, a fourth-order ODE concerning the elasticity of structural beams.
    Euler–Cauchy equation, a linear equidimensional second-order ODEs with variable coefficients. Its second-order version can emerge from Laplace equation in polar coordinates.
    Euler–Fermat theorem, that aφ(m) ≡ 1 (mod m) whenever a is coprime to m, and φ is Euler's totient function
    Euler–Fokker genus
    Euler–Lagrange equation, a second-order ODE emerging from minimization problems in calculus of variations.
    Euler–Lotka equation, a characteristic equation employed in mathematical demography
    Euler–Maclaurin formula (Euler's summation formula) relating integrals to sums
    Euler–Mascheroni constant, γ ≈ 0.5772, the limiting difference between the harmonic series and the natural logarithm.
    Euler–Poisson–Darboux equation, a second-order PDE playing important role in solving the wave equation.
    Euler–Rodrigues formula describing the rotation of a vector in three dimensions
    Euler–Tricomi equation – a second-order PDE emerging from Euler conservation equations.