Daniel Bernoulli
Swiss mathematician and physicist
1700 CE to 1782 CE
Daniel Bernoulli (Groningen, 8 February 1700 – Basel, 17 March 1782) was a Swiss mathematician and physicist and is one of the many prominent mathematicians in the Bernoulli family.
He is particularly remembered for his applications of mathematics to mechanics, especially fluid mechanics, and for his pioneering work in probability and statistics.
Bernoulli's work is still studied at length by many schools of science throughout the world.
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Daniel Bernoulli was born in Groningen, in the Netherlands, into a family of distinguished mathematicians.
The son of Johann Bernoulli (one of the "early developers" of calculus), nephew of Jakob Bernoulli (who was the first to discover the theory of probability), and older brother of Johann II, Daniel Bernoulli is said to have had a bad relationship with his father, Johann.
Upon both of them entering and tying for first place in a scientific contest at the University of Paris, Johann, unable to bear the "shame" of being compared as Daniel's equal, had banned Daniel from his house.
Johann Bernoulli also plagiarized some key ideas from Daniel's book Hydrodynamica in his own book Hydraulica that he backdated to before Hydrodynamica.
Despite Daniel's attempts at reconciliation, his father carries the grudge until his death.
When Daniel was seven, his younger brother Johann II Bernoulli was born.
Around schooling age, his father, Johann Bernoulli, had encouraged him to study business, there being poor rewards awaiting a mathematician.
However, Daniel had refused, because he wanted to study mathematics.
He later gave in to his father's wish and studied business.
His father had then asked him to study in medicine, and Daniel agreed under the condition that his father would teach him mathematics privately, which they continued for some time.
He is a contemporary and close friend of Leonhard Euler.
He goes to St. Petersburg in 1724 as professor of mathematics, but is unhappy here.
His earliest mathematical work is the Exercitationes (Mathematical Exercises), published in 1724 with the help of Goldbach.
In it, he expresses the numbers of the Fibonacci sequence in terms of the golden ratio.
Leonhard Euler, who in 1726 completed a dissertation on the propagation of sound with the title De Sono, is pursuing an (ultimately unsuccessful) attempt at this time to obtain a position at the University of Basel.
Around this time Johann Bernoulli's two sons, Daniel and Nicolas, are working at the Imperial Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg.
Nicolas had died of appendicitis on July 10, 1726, after spending a year in Russia, and when Daniel assumed his brother's position in the mathematics/physics division, he recommended that the post in physiology that he had vacated be filled by his friend Euler.
Euler eagerly had accepted the offer in November 1726, but has delayed making the trip to St Petersburg while he unsuccessfully applies for a physics professorship at the University of Basel.
Born on April 15, 1707, in Basel to Paul Euler, a pastor of the Reformed Church, his mother is Marguerite Brucker, a pastor's daughter.
He has two younger sisters named Anna Maria and Maria Magdalena.
Soon after the birth of Leonhard, the Eulers had moved from Basel to the town of Riehen, where Euler has spent most of his childhood.
Paul Euler is a friend of the Bernoulli family—Johann Bernoulli, who is at this time regarded as Europe's foremost mathematician, will eventually be the most important influence on young Leonhard.
Euler's early formal education had started in Basel, where he was sent to live with his maternal grandmother.
He had enrolled at the age of thirteen at the University of Basel, and in 1723 had received his Master of Philosophy with a dissertation that compared the philosophies of Descartes and Newton.
He was receiving Saturday afternoon lessons at this time from Johann Bernoulli, who quickly discovered his new pupil's incredible talent for mathematics.
Euler was at this point studying theology, Greek, and Hebrew at his father's urging, in order to become a pastor, but Bernoulli had persuaded Paul Euler that Leonhard is destined to become a great mathematician.
Christian Goldbach, born in the Duchy of Prussia's capital Königsberg, part of Brandenburg-Prussia, was the son of a pastor.
He had studied at the Royal Albertus University.
After finishing his studies he had undertaken long educational voyages from 1710 to 1724 through Europe, visiting other German states, England, Holland, Italy, and France, meeting with many famous mathematicians, such as Gottfried Leibniz, Leonhard Euler, and Nicholas I Bernoulli.
Back in Königsberg, he became acquainted with Georg Bernhard Bilfinger and Jakob Herman.
He had gone on to work at the newly opened St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences in 1725.
Later on, he was a tutor to the later Tsar Peter II in 1728.
He enters the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1742.
[Goldbach is most noted for his correspondence with Leibniz, Euler, and Bernoulli, especially in his 1742 letter to Euler stating his Goldbach's conjecture, one of the oldest and best-known unsolved problems in number theory and in all of mathematics.
It states: Every even integer greater than 2 can be expressed as the sum of two primes.
The conjecture has been shown to be correct up through 4 × 1018 and is generally assumed to be true, but no mathematical proof exists despite considerable effort.