Leonhard Euler discovered or was associated with so many mathematical/physics/etc concepts that people stopped naming them after him to keep from everything being Eulers'.
A 20th century mathematician with a similar problem was Paul Erdos.
What's also interesting is the existence of many profoundly gifted contemporaries in this same space of time, such as the Bernoulli's, Goldbach, LaGrange, just to name a few. He often corresponded with many of them as well.
Having studied Euler a little, I am at a loss to explain his work rate. Somehow I think such people are so far outside normal output for a human being and are under-explained. The guy could almost have been some other life-form wearing a disguise. JvN another of course.
200 letters over two years seems excessive to us, but not so in centuries past. An educated person with a knowledge job could might expect to write a dozen letters a day. A regular correspondence with a royal, any royal, would bring a degree of notoriety. He would also expect his letters to be read by others in the household, making the correspondence more of a connection to the royal family as a whole than with an individual princess. (A princess's communications with a commoner man would have been under constant scrutiny, the relationship tightly regulated.)
> a blog post every 3 days isn't going to raise anyones eyebrows.
for one, my eyebrows would be through the roof. A blog post every 3 days, for 2 straight years? Extremely surprising, notable and impressive (dear HNer, please spare us the comments about AI)
This is obviously a typo that escaped notice, and not the intentional double modal with which I grew up - never once hearing the word order swapped as here, because vernacular or otherwise it would not make sense with that phrasing.
If you're going to give notes, give correct notes. Otherwise you impress as one who thinks he's the smartest guy in the room, and a guy like that never is.
It looked like an honest double modal to me, just not quite the one noted in the online sources I could use. I find the double modal interesting because it doesn't exist in most varieties of English (nor in the text books!) but it is a normal part of everyday speech for millions of people. So, I made the most unobtrusive comment about it that I could.
> If you're going to give notes, give correct notes. Otherwise you impress as one who thinks he's the smartest guy in the room, and a guy like that never is.
I'm more typically accustomed to a severe and frankly tiresome degree of snark on such topics, having had more than half a lifetime more or less of such now by virtue of living outside the South but retaining a strong Mississippi accent in speech. Sometimes I forget I don't type with one, and read with insufficient charity in consequence.
That said, I do think your understanding may be usefully clarified for a bit of further analysis of the figure. "Might could" means "may be able to", and is constructed accordingly. No one would say "be able to may", and "could might" rings likewise false. The same meaning constructed from two modal verbs yields "could maybe," which is something I've often both heard and said.
I'd also note that there are lots of common English vernacular constructions, especially in more distinct dialects such as AAVE and my own Southern American English, which rarely appear in dictionaries. While we're burdened with no formal equivalent of l'Academie at least, there is a strong strain of prescriptivism wrapped around the loosely defined but quite real American system of social class, and relatively disfavored dialects such as both I just named consequently come in for a great deal of "that's not real English," with their figures often relegated to lexicons despite possessing as clear and consistent an internal grammar as any other English dialect - at least until they're adopted into mesolect, as with "y'all" and, thanks to Twitter putting a turbocharger on the appropriation of linguistic culture, roughly half of AAVE - in both cases, quite poorly. Comparing AAVE and SAE is always fraught given the history, even if that history needs to be a little esoteric to appreciate that a planter would've spoken quite differently from me, and thought me white trash besides. But I think it's fair to say both dialects about equally honor the music of language, albeit in somewhat different ways; meanwhile, the dialect of American mass culture insists on the tinniest of ears, and that above all else is what a modern American English dictionary seeks to document and formulate.
This isn't precisely to impugn the compilers of dictionaries, who do mostly good work despite my differences with their approach. It is to say it's worth knowing that for a lot of vernacular especially among disfavored dialects, a strong intuitive sense of English linguistics and the history of the language will often yield a clearer understanding.
There's a paper that touches on the question https://arxiv.org/abs/1406.7417v1 and fails to give a definitive answer, but a formal arrangement to prepare her for her role as princess-abbess in Herford seems likely.
According to Wikipedia [0] he was engaged as her tutor. At this stage in his career he had been given a post in the Berlin Academy by the monarch of Prussia, so as long as he was publishing research he could probably spend quite a bit of time doing whatever took his fancy.
Anyone else's blood boil at a world historical genius being required to verbally bow and scrape before an adolescent that did nothing more significant that being born to noble parents?
Why do you think he was required to verbally bow and scrape? The sample letters here show nothing more than ornate politeness.
His brilliance was known in his own time and he was respected and established at court.
Whether he saw advantage in this connection for financial, social or purely altruistic reasons is debatable, but it is presumptive I think to declare subservience.
More exploration of the possible context and relationship between them here:
Royalty commanded resources which Euler wanted to access, even if indirectly. In the modern world, geniuses have to do the same to e.g. gain funding. Maybe there is slightly more meritocracy now in determining who gains that level of power, but the improvement is not nearly as dramatic as you'd like to think. Nepotism is alive and well.
Leonhard Euler discovered or was associated with so many mathematical/physics/etc concepts that people stopped naming them after him to keep from everything being Eulers'.
A 20th century mathematician with a similar problem was Paul Erdos.
What's also interesting is the existence of many profoundly gifted contemporaries in this same space of time, such as the Bernoulli's, Goldbach, LaGrange, just to name a few. He often corresponded with many of them as well.
Having studied Euler a little, I am at a loss to explain his work rate. Somehow I think such people are so far outside normal output for a human being and are under-explained. The guy could almost have been some other life-form wearing a disguise. JvN another of course.
True - none of my mathematics textbooks have the name 'Paul Erdős' mentioned in them.
There's a charming transcription error in the first letter, substituting "fun" for sun, no doubt due to there having been a long s in the original.
:D
No, actually that's not the case, the original letters are in French, and probably not even available anymore. They must have OCRed an old edition like this https://archive.org/details/lettersofeuleron01eule/page/n71/...
... which is also the integral :)
Was this part of a paid position? 200+ letters is a fair bit so presumably a formal education arrangement of sorts
200 letters over two years seems excessive to us, but not so in centuries past. An educated person with a knowledge job could might expect to write a dozen letters a day. A regular correspondence with a royal, any royal, would bring a degree of notoriety. He would also expect his letters to be read by others in the household, making the correspondence more of a connection to the royal family as a whole than with an individual princess. (A princess's communications with a commoner man would have been under constant scrutiny, the relationship tightly regulated.)
It's closer to what we would call 200 blog posts, really, and a blog post every 3 days isn't going to raise anyones eyebrows.
> a blog post every 3 days isn't going to raise anyones eyebrows.
for one, my eyebrows would be through the roof. A blog post every 3 days, for 2 straight years? Extremely surprising, notable and impressive (dear HNer, please spare us the comments about AI)
> could might
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/double_modal
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/might_could#English
This is obviously a typo that escaped notice, and not the intentional double modal with which I grew up - never once hearing the word order swapped as here, because vernacular or otherwise it would not make sense with that phrasing.
If you're going to give notes, give correct notes. Otherwise you impress as one who thinks he's the smartest guy in the room, and a guy like that never is.
It looked like an honest double modal to me, just not quite the one noted in the online sources I could use. I find the double modal interesting because it doesn't exist in most varieties of English (nor in the text books!) but it is a normal part of everyday speech for millions of people. So, I made the most unobtrusive comment about it that I could.
> If you're going to give notes, give correct notes. Otherwise you impress as one who thinks he's the smartest guy in the room, and a guy like that never is.
You did not come across well there.
I'm more typically accustomed to a severe and frankly tiresome degree of snark on such topics, having had more than half a lifetime more or less of such now by virtue of living outside the South but retaining a strong Mississippi accent in speech. Sometimes I forget I don't type with one, and read with insufficient charity in consequence.
That said, I do think your understanding may be usefully clarified for a bit of further analysis of the figure. "Might could" means "may be able to", and is constructed accordingly. No one would say "be able to may", and "could might" rings likewise false. The same meaning constructed from two modal verbs yields "could maybe," which is something I've often both heard and said.
I'd also note that there are lots of common English vernacular constructions, especially in more distinct dialects such as AAVE and my own Southern American English, which rarely appear in dictionaries. While we're burdened with no formal equivalent of l'Academie at least, there is a strong strain of prescriptivism wrapped around the loosely defined but quite real American system of social class, and relatively disfavored dialects such as both I just named consequently come in for a great deal of "that's not real English," with their figures often relegated to lexicons despite possessing as clear and consistent an internal grammar as any other English dialect - at least until they're adopted into mesolect, as with "y'all" and, thanks to Twitter putting a turbocharger on the appropriation of linguistic culture, roughly half of AAVE - in both cases, quite poorly. Comparing AAVE and SAE is always fraught given the history, even if that history needs to be a little esoteric to appreciate that a planter would've spoken quite differently from me, and thought me white trash besides. But I think it's fair to say both dialects about equally honor the music of language, albeit in somewhat different ways; meanwhile, the dialect of American mass culture insists on the tinniest of ears, and that above all else is what a modern American English dictionary seeks to document and formulate.
This isn't precisely to impugn the compilers of dictionaries, who do mostly good work despite my differences with their approach. It is to say it's worth knowing that for a lot of vernacular especially among disfavored dialects, a strong intuitive sense of English linguistics and the history of the language will often yield a clearer understanding.
There's a paper that touches on the question https://arxiv.org/abs/1406.7417v1 and fails to give a definitive answer, but a formal arrangement to prepare her for her role as princess-abbess in Herford seems likely.
According to Wikipedia [0] he was engaged as her tutor. At this stage in his career he had been given a post in the Berlin Academy by the monarch of Prussia, so as long as he was publishing research he could probably spend quite a bit of time doing whatever took his fancy.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonhard_Euler#Berlin
I was just sort of thinking of it as a personalized KiwiCo Box for math facts.
Since they were published only eight years later, perhaps he already had that broader use in mind?
Anyone else's blood boil at a world historical genius being required to verbally bow and scrape before an adolescent that did nothing more significant that being born to noble parents?
In the old patronage system you genuflected to aristocracy, in the new one, to bureaucracy.
No.
Why do you think he was required to verbally bow and scrape? The sample letters here show nothing more than ornate politeness.
His brilliance was known in his own time and he was respected and established at court.
Whether he saw advantage in this connection for financial, social or purely altruistic reasons is debatable, but it is presumptive I think to declare subservience.
More exploration of the possible context and relationship between them here:
https://arxiv.org/abs/1406.7417v1
(Edit: paper also linked earlier in another comment in this thread)
Blood boil? No.
Royalty commanded resources which Euler wanted to access, even if indirectly. In the modern world, geniuses have to do the same to e.g. gain funding. Maybe there is slightly more meritocracy now in determining who gains that level of power, but the improvement is not nearly as dramatic as you'd like to think. Nepotism is alive and well.
I love how unapologetic Euler is with his belief in soul. Pretty striking to be connecting soil with the nervous system!
Also a philosopher who believed in the harmony between science and faith.