This year's French Academy of Sciences prize is based on a problem on the masting of ships: to calculate the number of masts to use and where in the ship to locate them.

Pierre Bouguer—a man now known as "the father of naval architecture"—gains the award for his paper On the masting of ships; and two other prizes, one for his dissertation On the best method of observing the altitude of stars at sea and the other for his paper On the best method of observing the variation of the compass at sea.

The nineteen-year-old Leonhard Euler enters for the prize with an essay written in 1726 and published in 1728.

He places second, and subsequently will win this coveted annual prize twelve times in his career.