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Leonhard Euler’s Letters Leonhard Euler’s Letters

Leonhard Euler’s Letters to a German Princess Ronald S Calinger, Ekaterina (Katya) Denisova and Elena N Polyakhova
to a German Princess
A milestone in the history of physics textbooks and more to a German Princess
Ronald S Calinger, Ekaterina (Katya) Denisova and
Elena N Polyakhova
A milestone in the history of physics
textbooks and more
Leonhard Euler’s Letters to a German Princess: A milestone in the history of physics textbooks
and more examines the life and work of Euler and his legacy as the foremost mathematician,
theoretical physicist and theoretical astronomer during the 18th-century Enlightenment. It
Ronald S Calinger
also analyzes the leading textbooks used in physics education in the latter 17th and early 18th Ekaterina (Katya) Denisova
centuries in Europe and British America. The text investigates the search to identify two German
princesses taking physics lessons by mail from Euler. Over two years, from 1760 to 1762, Euler
Elena N Polyakhova
wrote 234 letters to the princesses on different topics including astronomy, music, optics,
magnetism, electricity, motion and navigation, with less on theology and philosophy, especially
logic. The first two volumes of the letters were published in French in 1768 by the Russian
Academy of Sciences. Its third volume appeared there in 1772. Today, 250 years later, we study
this work of Euler’s as a foundation for the history of physics teaching, and analyze the letters
from a historical and pedagogical point of view. This book includes selected full and abbreviated
letters and a summary of the physics content.

About the authors

Ronald S Calinger is a professor of history emeritus at The Catholic University of America.
Ekaterina (Katya) Denisova is a physics educator and teacher professional developer at
Baltimore City Public Schools, Maryland. Elena N Polyakhova has been teaching celestial
mechanics at the St Petersburg University Astronomy Department since 1957.

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Leonhard Euler’s Letters to a
German Princess
A milestone in the history of physics textbooks and more
 Leonhard Euler’s Letters to a
German Princess
A milestone in the history of physics textbooks and more

Frontispiece of Lettres à une Princesse d’Allemagne sur divers sujets de Physique & de Philosophie (1768).
Source: https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1406/1406.7417.pdf.

Ronald S Calinger
Catholic University of America, Washington, DC, USA

Ekaterina (Katya) Denisova

Baltimore City Public Schools, Baltimore, MD, USA

Elena N Polyakhova
St. Petersburg State University, St. Petersburg, Russia

Morgan & Claypool Publishers

Copyright ª 2019 Morgan & Claypool Publishers

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ISBN 978-1-64327-192-7 (ebook)

ISBN 978-1-64327-189-7 (print)
ISBN 978-1-64327-190-3 (mobi)

DOI 10.1088/2053-2571/aae6d2

Version: 20190601

IOP Concise Physics

ISSN 2053-2571 (online)
ISSN 2054-7307 (print)

A Morgan & Claypool publication as part of IOP Concise Physics

Published by Morgan & Claypool Publishers, 1210 Fifth Avenue, Suite 250, San Rafael, CA,
94901, USA

IOP Publishing, Temple Circus, Temple Way, Bristol BS1 6HG, UK

To Elena for the proposal and to Betty for technical assistance and in loving memory
of Aleksey Gavril (1974–2019), who never stopped questioning.
 Contents

Preface x
Prologue: physics pedagogy xiv
Author biographies xvi

1 Physics textbooks: origins before 1650 and principal natural 1-1

philosophies and physics textbooks of the Enlightenment
1.1 Physics textbooks: origins before 1650 1-1
1.2 Principal Enlightenment natural philosophies 1-4
1.3 Physics textbooks in Europe and North America 1-10

2 The two princesses and the Letters 2-1

2.1 The two princesses: errors, lineage, and biographies 2-1
2.2 The Letters: creation, publication and translation 2-6

3 Euler: life, research, and teaching 3-1

3.1 The Swiss years, 1707–27 3-3
3.2 At the new Petersburg Academy: pathbreaking groundwork, 1727–41 3-5
3.3 At the renovated Berlin Academy: the summit of his career, 1741–66 3-12
3.4 Return to the Petersburg Academy: a vigorous autumn, 1766–83 3-19

4 Selected letters from Volume 1 (letters 1–79) 4-1

4.1 Sound 4-1
4.1.1 Letter 3. Of sound and its velocity 4-2
4.1.2 Letter 5. Of unison and octaves 4-6
4.2 Composition of atmosphere 4-9
4.2.1 Letter 15. Changes produced in the atmosphere by heat 4-10
and cold
4.3 Nature of light 4-14
4.3.1 Letter 17. Of light, and the systems of Descartes and Newton 4-15
4.3.2 Letter 20. Of the propagation of light 4-20
4.3.3 Letter 19. A different system respecting the nature of rays 4-25
and of light, proposed (ether)
4.3.4 Letter 28. Nature of colors in particular 4-31
4.3.5 Letter 31. Refraction of rays of different colors 4-35

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 Leonhard Euler’s Letters to a German Princess

4.4 Optics and optical instruments 4-39

4.4.1 Letter 43. Farther continuation. Difference between the eye 4-40
of an animal, and the artificial eye, or camera obscura
4.5 Gravity 4-44
4.5.1 Letter 45. Of gravity, considered a general property of body 4-45
4.5.2 Letter 51. Gravity of the Moon 4-50
4.5.3 Letter 52. Discovery of universal Gravitation by Newton 4-53
4.5.4 Letter 53. Continuation. Of the mutual attraction of the 4-57
heavenly bodies
4.6 Tides 4-61
4.6.1 Letter 63. Different opinions of philosophers respecting the flux 4-62
and reflux of the Sea
4.6.2 Letter 64. Explanation of the flux and reflux, from the 4-65
attractive power of the Moon
4.7 Principle of least action 4-68
4.7.1 Letter 78. The same subject. Principle of the least 4-69
possible action

5 Selected letters from Volume 2 (letters 80–154) and Volume 3 5-1

(letters 155–234)
5.1 Liberty, happiness, and truth 5-1
5.1.1 Letter 85. Of the liberty of spirits; and a reply to objection 5-2
against liberty
5.1.2 Letter 91. The liberty of intelligent beings in harmony with the 5-5
doctrines of the christian religion
5.1.3 Letter 97. Refutation of the idealists 5-9
5.1.4 Letter 114. Of true happiness. Conversion of sinners 5-14
5.1.5 Letter 115. The true foundation of human knowledge. 5-18
Sources of truth, and classes of information derived from it
5.2 Systems of monads and pre-established harmony 5-22
5.2.1 Letter 76. System of monads of Wolff 5-23
5.2.2 Letter 125. Of monads 5-27
5.2.3 Letter 83. Examination of the system of pre-established 5-30
harmony. An objection to it
5.3 Calculation of longitude and latitude 5-34
5.3.1 Letter 160. Method of determining the latitude, or the 5-36
elevation of the pole
5.3.2 Letter 167. The motion of Moon a fifth method 5-41

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 Leonhard Euler’s Letters to a German Princess

5.3.3 Letter 168. Advantages of this last Method: its degree 5-44
of precision
5.4 Electricity and magnetism 5-47
5.4.1 Letter 139. The true principle of nature on which are founded 5-47
all the phenomena of electricity (from volume 2)
5.4.2 Letter 176. True magnetic direction; subtle matter which 5-50
produces the magnetic power
5.4.3 Letter 177. Nature of magnetic matter, and its rapid current. 5-50
Magnetic canals

6 Afterword 6-1

7 Selected bibliography 7-1

8 Glossary of principal names 8-1

ix
 Preface

Leonhard Euler’s Lettres à une Princesse d’Allemagne sur divers sujects de physique
& de philosophie (Letters to a German Princess on Different Subjects in Physics and
Philosophy) is a milestone in the history of physics textbooks, the popularization of
the sciences, and the teaching of women in them. From April 1760 to May 1762,
Euler sent 234 letters to two German princesses of Brandenburg-Schwedt instruct-
ing them in the natural sciences, philosophy and religion, and physical science
questions. This came roughly to one or two letters a week. The portion of the
Letters addressing physics or natural philosophy encompassed a range of subjects
that Euler had pursued outside of pure mathematics. He gives basics in ten
disciplines for non-scientists: astronomy, celestial mechanics, cosmography,
mechanics, mechanics of elastic systems, music theory, physics, optics, electricity,
and magnetism, and dealing less with philosophy and religion. He treats at length
the composition of the air and changes caused by heat, cold, and altitude as well as
new instruments and technology, such as the latest thermometers, microscopes,
telescopes, and camera obscura; he refers also to ballistics and hydromechanics.
Among the topics in physics are the theory of sounds and the theory of light. The
extent of his discussion of electricity, letters 138–54, and magnetism, 169–87,
reflects the great interest in them at the time. The popular letters, written in an easy
form, cover with genial clarity all the natural philosophy of the mid-eighteenth
century. Euler taught everything that he believed his young correspondents should
know in the physical sciences.

Euler’s signature.
Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d3/Euler%27s_signature.svg.

During his final years in Berlin from 1762 to late 1766, Euler gathered and
edited the separate letters, which the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St.
Petersburg (hereafter, Petersburg Academy) published in a large three-volume
book in French. The first two volumes appeared in 1768, the third in 1772. The
resulting Letters to a German Princess also offer the views of its author on
epistemology and the history of science. For its scope and depth, which exceed a
mild curiosity and the basic instruction of an adolescent, it may be surmised that
Euler actually wrote them for the European and Russian reading publics. The
Letters to a German Princess, containing materials that taxed even the wits of
savants, have been described as the chief treasury for physical knowledge made
during the eighteenth century.

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 Leonhard Euler’s Letters to a German Princess

The two German princesses taught were the fifteen-year-old Frederike Charlotte
Leopoldine Ludovica Louise (1745–1808) and her younger sister, Louise Henriette
Wilhelmine (1750–1811), to whom the letters were addressed1. This introduction
outlines the subjects in the Letters to a German Princess. Chapter 2 briefly examines
two errors in identifying the princesses, to whom they were addressed, and the
resolution in 2002. It continues with biographical notes on each, the course of
writing and publishing the Letters, and reviews three of the first translations as well
as principal natural philosophies during the Enlightenment. The two pupils were
educated together, and Euler probably recognized both as ‘Votre Altesse’ (Your
Highness). From their father’s title of prince of Prussia, both were princesses of
Prussia.
Euler’s 234 letters may be divided into three general subject matter sections:
general natural science: 1–79, philosophy and religion: 80–120, and a diverse range
of physical science questions: 121–234. An outline of topics in these three sections
follows.

Section 1: General natural science Basic topics: magnitude, sound, air, heat, light,
colors, optics, eye, glass (Letters 1—44)

Magnitude (grandeur) or extension and velocity (1–2)

Sound, the harpsichord, and pleasures from fine music (3–8)
Air, the atmosphere, heat, gunpowder, air guns, and the barometer (9–16)
Light, including the systems of Descartes and Newton, and its propagation
(17–20)
A digression on the distances of heavenly bodies and the nature of the Sun (21)
Opaque and luminous bodies, colors relative to optics, catoptrics, dioptrics,
vision, burning mirrors, the structure of the eye, and a camera obscura
(22–44)

Newton’s inverse-square law of gravitational attraction, gravity on Earth’s surface, the

tides, celestial motion, lunar motion, impenetrable bodies, mechanics, acceleration,
criticism of Wolff’s monads (Letters 45–79)
Gravity as a general property of bodies, debates over its validity and objections
to its effects, the universal gravitation of Newton, its influence on planetary
motion, including small irregularities and other celestial motion (45–61)
Differing explanations of the tides, flux and reflux, and disputes over the impact
of universal gravitation (62–8)
The nature of bodies: extension, impenetrability and inertia (69–70)
Mechanics, universal, accelerated, and retarded motion of bodies, disputes over
the principal laws of motion, and inertia (71–5)

1
See Judith Kopelevich, ‘History of the Creation of the ‘Letters’ and their Addressees’ in Leonard Euler:
Letters to a German Princess about Various Physical and Philosophical Matters (2002) ed Nina Nevskaya et al
(Saint-Petersburg: Nauka), pp 535–54 (in Russian).

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 Leonhard Euler’s Letters to a German Princess

Objections to the monadic doctrine of Wolff in the theory of matter, and then to
Leibniz’s pre-established harmony (76–9)

Section 2: Philosophy and religion Review of liberty, perfection of languages,

abstraction, the permission of evil, happiness, and truth (Letters 80–120)
Natural, supernatural, or moral events; liberty of intelligent beings and spirits;
the soul, prayer, and disproving materialists and idealists (80–97)
Memory; perfection of languages; the senses, abstraction, and different modes
of syllogisms and logic (98–108)
Origins of Euler–Venn diagrams (102–6)
The origins of evil and permission for it, true happiness, the sources of truth, the
senses and types of truth, certainty, and Pyrrhonian skepticism (109–20)

Section 3: Physical science questions electricity; astronomical methods for

determining latitude and longitude on the open sea; magnetism and magnetic devices;
the optics of lenses and optical devices (telescope, optical tubes, etc); and stellar
distances (Letters 121–234)
Magnitude or extension and divisibility ad infinitum (121–32)
Detailed revisit to Wolff’s monad doctrine with objections and support, the
principle of sufficient reason (125, May 5, 1761–132 May 30, 1761)
Colors and the human voice (133–7)
A lengthy examination of electricity, the Leyden jar, lightening, thunder, and
averting their effects (138–54)
The magnitude of Earth, methods of determining latitude, meridians, and the
‘celebrated problem of finding longitude’ on ships at sea (six methods,
155–68)
Ships and propulsion, magnetic forces, precision (169–86)
Dioptrics, lenses, pocket glasses, camera obscura, constructing microscopes,
quality of telescopes, remedying defects (187–222)
The distance of the stars, the size of the moon, eclipses of the Moon and
Jupiter’s satellites, and the color of the heavens (223–34)

The content and selection of topics for the Letters to a German Princess came
from the scientific interests of Euler himself and research of the time, conducted
mainly at the Royal Society of London, the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences
and Arts in Berlin (or Berlin Academy), the Petersburg Academy, and especially the
Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris (Paris Academy). Most important were the
annual competitions at the Paris Academy that Euler won twelve times. He also kept
up to date the journals of each, including the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal
Society, at times ordering them for the science libraries in St. Petersburg and Berlin.
The letters reflect Euler’s mature scientific views rather than tracing in a few cases his
evolving thought. In earlier books and articles he had described natural phenomena
in detail.

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 Leonhard Euler’s Letters to a German Princess

Euler’s Letters to a German Princess became the most exhaustive and author-
itative encyclopedia for physical knowledge written during the eighteenth-century
Enlightenment. He explained this knowledge clearly and simply to literate
Europeans, Russians, and the English colonists in North America. Euler’s idea of
the ether, an extremely tenuous and elastic form of matter filling in otherwise empty
space, was the fundamental concept in his physics. His concept of the ether appeared
first in the initial volume of the Letters to a German Princess. He applied it to explain
most of the principles underlying physical phenomena: mechanical, celestial,
electrical, magnetic, and optical. From his study and computations for motions of
the moon, planets, and comets, he was to confirm the exactness obtained from the
law of mutual attraction acting alone according to the inverse squares of the
distances between them, thereby showing that Isaac Newton was correct. Euler had
changed after first thinking that a small modification of Newton was needed for
explaining irregularities in lunar motion. His application of the ether to explain
celestial motions was later often interpreted as Cartesian. But his ether was not that
of Descartes. For Euler it was a new concept of space set within a new physics.
From 1787 to the present, the Letters to a German Princess have been hugely
successful. The European reading public quickly recognized their merits. They were
the most popular scientific text of the late eighteenth century and at least the first
half of the nineteenth. Inspired by preceding best-selling popular works in the
sciences, Bernard Fontenelle’s Entretiens sur la Pluralité des Mondes (Conversations
on the Plurality of Worlds, 1686), simply known as Mondes, with its more ingenious
explanation of the system of vortices in the heavens and Cartesian physics, the
Letters to a German Princess quickly surpassed them. By 1800 there were 30 editions
and translations from French into eight other languages: Russian, German, Danish,
Dutch, English, Italian, Spanish, and Swedish, which were most of the major
languages in Europe. Most of their early translations were based on Condorcet’s
French edition (1787–89), which is described in chapter 2. The Letters to a German
Princess were a principal document of the Enlightenment. By 1840 there were in
Europe over 40 editions of the Letters to a German Princess. The Petersburg editions
from 1768 and 1772, published in French, were the source for the French edition in
Paris in 1843 and the enlarged version there in 1859 that was the basis for the Letters
to a German Princess printed in volumes 11 and 12 of the third series of Euler’s
Opera omnia in 1960. The work is still in use.
Mainly a popular but fundamental presentation of the principles of physics, the
Letters to a German Princess have generated the interests of generations of scientists
for the 250 years since their first publication. Euler wrote a unique and important
text that is a monument to education, teaching, the history of science, and the basics
and development of physics. In all this, it makes a contribution to world culture.

xiii
 Prologue: physics pedagogy

The pedagogical reforms of the Common Core and Next Generation Science
Standards (NGSS) require K-12 and college physics educators take a different
look at the way physics is taught to twenty-first-century students. The standards
push for the shift from instructor-delivered facts, concepts, and relationships to
students’ direct engagement with empirical evidence and to conceptual modeling
with the purpose of explaining natural phenomena. NGSS place greater emphasis on
helping students understand not only science content (products of science), but also
the processes and practices scientists use to create new knowledge, including
argument, observation, and experimentation. This change in teaching practice, as
a reflection of the constructivist view of knowledge acquisition, makes the role of a
science textbook in twenty-first century interesting and unique. Science education
community recommends more rigorous hands-on student investigations, and
student argumentation based on learners’ prior knowledge and experiences and
favors a lesser use of textbook, as a ‘collection of facts’. Many physics educators
believe that textbooks remove many of the exciting discovery and aha moments for
learners.
Modern science textbooks, including online versions, are seen by teachers as
resources that invite students to think, ask new questions, and design new inves-
tigations to make meaning of the world around them. In the glossary, we include a
list of the most prominent physics textbooks, used both at high school and college
level in the US.
By reading Euler’s Letters, published almost 300 years ago, we come to a
conclusion that teaching physics by attempting to explain everyday situations
culturally familiar to the learner (Why is the sky blue, Letter 32; vibrations of bells,
Letter 3; human vision, Letter 41; air pressure in guns, Letter 13, etc), is clearly not a
new approach. The most remarkable in this sense are letters on physics of musical
instruments, and nature of sound and music (Letters 4–8). Euler starts the discussion
with the description of sound propagation through air and gradually transitions to
his views on music and the evaluation of the musical pleasure to the arithmetic
measurement of the proportions attached to the sounds. In Letter 9, Euler describes
air as a medium of sound propagation and then transitions to the discussion of air
compression, atmosphere and gas properties. He uses music as an engaging and
familiar concept, which connects a variety of fundamental physics ideas into a rich
tapestry, which nowadays are classified as acoustics, material science, and earth
science.
In the Letters, we also find several cases when Euler uses the modern NGSS-
endorsed pedagogy of evidence-based argument: to make sense of a phenomenon, he
presents opposing points of view and provides justifications of his ideas by providing
evidence from observations and explains his reasoning. For example, in letters 23
and 24, Euler presents two opposing views on light reflection off opaque objects
(houses, moon, planets), arguing that ‘we do not see opaque bodies by means of the
rays reflected from their surface’ and provides comparison to the process of light

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 Leonhard Euler’s Letters to a German Princess

reflecting off a mirror. By including this conceptual debate in his thought process, he
naturally taps into one of the areas of most severe and persistent ‘student
misconceptions’, the study of which are also a foundation of modern science
teaching strategies. In the same manner, in Letter 17 Euler argues with Newton’s
theory that the luminous rays are separated from the body of the Sun, and ‘the
particles of light thence emitted with that inconceivable velocity which brings them
down to us in eight minutes…. This opinion is called the system of emanation: it
being imagined that rays emanate from the Sun and other luminous bodies, as water
emanates or springs from a fountain.’ He gives his reasons why he disagrees with
Newton’s corpuscular theory and why he did not accept it, even if many thinkers of
his time did2.

2
Musielak D 2014 ‘Euler and the German Princess’, arXiv preprint (arXiv:1406.7417).

xv
 Author biographies

Ronald S Calinger
Ronald S Calinger received his doctorate in the history of science
from the University of Chicago in 1971. He is professor of history
emeritus at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC.
He specializes in the history of mathematics and the mathematical
sciences during the Enlightenment and the early nineteenth century.
He has taught year-long courses on the history of mathematics, the
history of science, and imperial Austria. He received the Austrian
Cross, for the Sciences and Arts, First Class, 1996. He was the Founding Chancellor
of the Euler Society, 2003, a Dibner Library Resident Scholar, 2007 and 2010, and
was invited to lecture on imperial Austria during the Mozart celebration by the
Smithsonian Associates, 2006–7. He has written more than 70 research articles and
reviews in such journals as Isis, Archive for History of Exact Sciences, Science, and
Annals of Science. Among his eight books, he edited Vita Mathematica: Historical
Research and Integration with Teaching, 1996, and Classics of Mathematics, 1999,
and wrote A Contextual History of Mathematics: to Euler, 1999, and Leonhard
Euler: Mathematical Genius in the Enlightenment, 2016.

Ekaterina (Katya) Denisova

Ekaterina (Katya) Denisova is a physics educator and teacher
professional developer at Baltimore City Public Schools, Maryland.
She earned a Master’s degree in Science Education from University
of Northern Iowa, Iowa and a PhD in Physics Education from
Herzen State Pedagogical University of Russia. Her research
focuses on common students’ difficulties and misconceptions in
conceptual physics courses and strategies of framing science
teaching around students’ culture. Katya is an active member of the American
Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT).

Elena N Polyakhova
Elena N Polyakhova graduated from the Mathematics and
Mechanics Department (Astronomy Division) of the Leningrad
University in 1957 and has been teaching Celestial Mechanics at the
St. Petersburg State University Astronomy Department since then.
The scope of Polyakhova’s research interests include celestial
mechanics, astrodynamics (space flight dynamics and solar sailing
theory), history of natural sciences (physics, mechanics, astronomy,
astrodynamics), biographies and scientific legacies of scientists (Leonhard Euler,
Sofya Kovalevskaya, Michael Ostrogradsky, Alexander Lyapunov), and of classical

xvi
 Leonhard Euler’s Letters to a German Princess

and celestial mechanics scholars of St. Petersburg. Polyakhova has published more
than 200 research articles, several books, and reference materials on celestial
mechanics and history of sciences. In 2012 The Princess Ekaterina Romanovna
Dashkova’s Society (founded by the Dashkova’s Moscow Humanitarian Institute)
awarded Elena Polyakhova with the gold medal For Freedom and Enlightenment.
Elena Polyakhova is honored by the name of a minor planet (asteroid): the
numbered minor planet (NMP) 4619 Polyakhova is named after her.

xvii
 IOP Concise Physics

Leonhard Euler’s Letters to a German Princess

A milestone in the history of physics textbooks and more
Ronald S Calinger, Ekaterina (Katya) Denisova and Elena N Polyakhova

Chapter 1
Physics textbooks: origins before 1650 and
principal natural philosophies and physics
textbooks of the Enlightenment

1.1 Physics textbooks: origins before 1650

Up to the mid-seventeenth century, the forerunners of modern physics textbooks
rested on scholastic or peripatetic physics, until they were supplanted by Cartesian
mechanics. The sciences were changing, for example with the role of magic. The
name scholastic comes from its teachers, the schoolmen, at medieval universities in
the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Their textbooks began with the critical
method and thought of Aristotle (384 BC–322 BC) with their syllogisms and added
commentary from medieval Islamic and western authorities and thinkers. The
scholastics sought to explain the entire Universe, stars, earth, animals, plants, and
inanimate matter. Written in Latin, the language of learning of the time, their
textbooks did not employ mathematics, made no references to experiments, and did
not analyze any scientific problems. Their chief purpose was to confirm truths, not to
make discoveries. The procedure in this early teaching of science was to read the
text, which was the authority, and discuss and dispute its main principles by the use
of deduction based on various interpretations of the accuracy of observations. To
explain puzzling phenomena the scholastics appealed to passive occult qualities.
Having enjoyed a two-millennia dominance, scholastic physics with its
Aristotelian origins was challenged and largely surpassed in the seventeenth century,
mainly by the French philosopher, mathematician, and physicist René Descartes
(1596–1650) with his new rationalism and the English statesman Francis Bacon
(1561–1626), who appealed to an inductive, empirical method (figure 1.1). Like
Renaissance humanists, both were skeptical of accepted thought from antiquity, in
this case the scientific, and attacked blind submission to it. Descartes displaced it
with his mechanics, its laws of bodies in motion, including the conservation of
momentum. The Cartesians found scholastic explanations with occult qualities

doi:10.1088/2053-2571/aae6d2ch1 1-1 ª Morgan & Claypool Publishers 2019

 Leonhard Euler’s Letters to a German Princess

Figure 1.1. Euler diagrams for the four Aristotelian propositions.

Source: Picturing probability: the power of Venn diagrams, the richness of Eikoseograms (http://sas.uwaterloo.
ca/~rwoldfor/papers/venn/eikosograms/paperpdf.pdf).

inadequate and rejected them. They ridiculed the metaphysical explanations of

phenomena by the doctrine of substantial forms. These forms or ideas were the
source of properties of order and unity. Among the four types of Aristotelian causes,
formal, material, efficient and final, they are closest to the efficient. But the new
Cartesian metaphysics did not resolve the connections in the Cartesian dualism of
mind and extension in the nature of basic matter, active or passive and elastic or
hard, nor did it eliminate inconsistencies.
Descartes had set forth a purely rationalist system in his greatest work, Discourse
de la Méthode (Discourse on Method, 1636) (figure 1.2). Written in an elegant
French, he presented an original, exhaustive deductive method by which to find
truth in the sciences. He rested upon an axiomatic foundation, universal and self-
evident, the structure of the sciences that provided an absolute grounding for
deduction. In methodology, he subordinated observation and experiment to reason.
Descartes’ dualism divided all created existence into matter (beginning with
extension) and mind (un-extended thinking substance). In Principia Philosophia
(Principles of Philosophy, 1644) Descartes offered a mechanistic cosmology.
Rejecting the idea of occult qualities and that of the void, Descartes proposed the
Universe was a plenum consisting of a system of vortices (or tourbillions), whirlpools
of ether, in the heavens with movement provided by action at contact (impulsion).
An inventor of analytic geometry, Descartes, especially in his Principia philoso-
phiae (Principles of Philosophy), published in 1644, rooted physics in mathematics
and a thorough deductive method. Descartes employed a textbook form to explain
all of physics. By contrast in method, Bacon, the author of Novum Organum
Scientiarum (New Scientific Method, 1620), had set out a new, empirical and
inductive procedure (figure 1.3). He urged gathering relevant data, a thorough
analysis of them, and the performing of organized experimentation to uncover the
secrets of nature. His critical empirical methods led to modern scientific inquiry.

1-2
 Leonhard Euler’s Letters to a German Princess

Figure 1.2. René Descartes.

Source: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Rene-Descartes/images-videos.

Figure 1.3. Francis Bacon.

Source: https://www.biography.com/people/francis-bacon-9194632.

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 Leonhard Euler’s Letters to a German Princess

Three of the leading physics textbooks used in Europe during the late seventeenth
to the mid-eighteenth century were by the Genevan theologian and biblical scholar
Jean Leclerc (1657–1736), the French philosopher, mathematician, and physicist
Jacques Rohault (1618–72), and the English inventor Charles Morton. Leclerc wrote
Physica sive de rebus corporeis (Physics, or, of corpuscular bodies, 1696), which had
several editions. It took a mechanical approach with the action of small bodies
underlying physics. Rohault wrote the masterful Traité de Physique, 1671. His last
book, Systeme de philosophie et philosophie naturelle (System of Philosophy and
Natural Philosophy) was only published posthumously in 1720. Charles Morton had
an unpublished but semi-popular Compendium Physicae. Among these scholars
Jacques Rohault, one of the most important Cartesians, mediated between Aristotle
and Descartes. Accepting the Cartesian mechanistic philosophy and its laws, he
attacked the uncritical acceptance of ancient authority, and his own strain of
Cartesian physics required experiment. He viewed reason and experiment both as
essential for scientific studies and designed instruments that included an air pump.
The Traité de physique was rapidly translated into Latin and became the standard
textbook in physics up to the mid-eighteenth century. It dealt with hydrostatics,
optics, solids, animate bodies, and machines. On the recent studies of the circulation
of the blood, Rohault preferred William Harvey to Descartes. The English
Newtonian Samuel Clarke translated Rohault’s Traité de Physique and added
corrections. This book helped spread Newtonian thought, but Rohault had
considered action at a distance absurd.

1.2 Principal Enlightenment natural philosophies

The Enlightenment had four main natural philosophies: Cartesian, Newtonian,
Leibnizian, and Wolffian. Of these four, the Cartesian, just summarized, was the
oldest. In continental western Europe, mid-century controversies at the Paris
Academy centered around vestiges of Cartesian science and Isaac Newton’s
Principia Mathematica over the shape of Earth, the tides, irregularities in lunar
motion, and the paths of comets. The quest was to find exact answers and formulate
mathematical equations in differential calculus to reach them. Leiden University
was central in developing Newtonian science from the start, and from the mid-
century so were the Paris Academy and the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences
and Arts in Berlin (hereafter, the Berlin Academy). Leibnizian and Wolffian sciences
were investigated in German lands at schools and universities. Observations,
experiments, and measurements were done with new improved equipment, including
timepieces, surveying equipment, microscopes, and telescopes, and by proposing
annual challenge problems and expeditions. Answers to problems were sometimes
known beforehand. Differing results were possible until obtaining exact answers.
Leonhard Euler excelled in formulating the new differential calculus computations
to achieve precise answers, so even when others found them he would occasionally
be asked to devise the required mathematics. New royal and imperial science
academies and their observatories in London, St. Petersburg, Berlin, and especially
Paris now surpassed universities in scientific discoveries, research, and applications.

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Except for the case of London, they now had funding or helped raise funds for
projects. In one subject, astronomy, there was cooperation, principally in developing
a new lunar theory to cover irregularities and to describe accurately the courses of
comets and the transit of Venus.
Writers of physics textbooks had the work of two extraordinary scientific geniuses
of the late seventeenth and the early eighteenth century to present, explain, and
elaborate. The first of these was the English natural philosopher and mathematician
Isaac Newton (1642–1727) (figure 1.4). In the Principia Mathematica, published in
1687, Newton, the Lucasian Professor at the University of Cambridge in England,
developed a general dynamics providing sound definitions, introducing new con-
cepts and recasting separated phenomena and laws. Under the universal law of
gravitational attraction by inverse-squares of distances between bodies, he unified
celestial and terrestrial physics. Previously, celestial motion had been seen as
separate, the heavenly bodies moving in perfect circles. Newton accepted
Copernican heliocentric astronomy, but even after Johannes Kepler’s three laws
of planetary motion projected elliptical planetary orbits in our solar system, some
astronomers still attempted to modify the Copernican model. In his method of
fluxions, Newton also independently invented the beginnings of calculus. In Book 1
of the Principia Mathematica, he wrote about prime and ultimate ratios, roughly

Figure 1.4. Isaac Newton.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton#/media/File:GodfreyKneller-IsaacNewton-1689.jpg.

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derivatives. Though most convergency tests were a century away, he knew the
importance of convergence tests for infinite series. For the new fluxional calculus,
Newton later developed as central a hazy concept of limit. Although his Principia
Mathematica is geometric in format, Newton must have had the new calculus, which
offered a powerful method for solving an expanded range of problems in physics not
possible with Euclidean geometry.
In his Opticks, published in 1704, Newton argued that the basic matter in the
Universe is passive, impenetrable, indivisible atoms, advanced a corpuscular
(emission) theory of light, and gave his critical empirical methodology. He accepted
the concept of the void and maintained that the Universe is nearly vacuous,
essentially a nutshell. In his universe matter occupies but a small portion of space
and is extremely tenuous. During the Enlightenment, the Opticks was as influential
as Newton’s Principia mathematica. But religious leaders believed that his idea of
atomistic corpuscles led to atheism. Even as science continued discarding magic and
the occult, Newton made extensive alchemical studies, part of which included the
occult. His experiments with some form of ‘sophick mercury’ or lead may have
harmed his health.
In German lands a similar situation existed toward the development of the
physical sciences as in the rest of western Europe. German areas, especially
Brandenburg-Prussia and Hanover, had their own Enlightenment natural philoso-
phers, teachers, lecturers, and educational specialists. The most famous were the
German philosopher, polymath, mathematician, natural philosopher, logician, and
historian Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), who also made significant
contributions to jurisprudence, epistemology, language, and geology along with
the German rationalist philosopher, mathematician, writer on politics and natural
law Christian Freiherr (Baron) von Wolff (1697–1754).
Leibniz, known as the last ‘universal genius’, was the foremost successor to
Descartes in continental rationalism (figure 1.5). In De Rerum Originatione
(Ultimate Origination of the Universe, 1697), he described a Platonic universe in
which God geometrizes. He believed that the mind is active, not a passive tabula
rasa. In the debate between which is superior, faith in written revelation or reason,
he opposed Pierre Bayle’s Pyrrhonistic skepticism. Leibniz anonymously published
Théodicée (Theodicy, 1710), which asserted that truths of faith in written revelation
and reason must agree, but when they do not, he espoused the primacy of reason. At
the core of his metaphysics and science, he distinguished between the necessary
truths of reason and the contingent truths of facts. His deductive methodology had
two axioms: the principles of contradiction (POC) and sufficient reason (PSR). He
followed ancient thought that nothing is without a reason (in Latin, nihil est sine
ratione). To cover all physical causality, he coupled sufficient reason with his
metaphysical law of optimism, that the real world is ‘the best of all possible worlds’.
As articulated by Johann I Bernoulli and Isaac Newton, sufficient reason became the
guiding principle of classical physics. Leibniz described two ‘labyrinths’ from the
continuum of knowledge that connect them and the concept of human freedom,
which could lead reason astray. Above all, his world was intelligible.

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 Leonhard Euler’s Letters to a German Princess

Figure 1.5. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottfried_Wilhelm_Leibniz#/media/File:Gottfried_Wilhelm_Leibniz,
_Bernhard_Christoph_Francke.jpg.

The foundation of Leibniz’s physics was his doctrine of monads, the theory of
energy underlying matter. It was the cornerstone of his physics. He rejected
Descartes’ extension and the hard, indivisible, and passive atoms of the ancient
Greeks as well as Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655). His final account of animate monads
described them as geometric points of energy, well ordered in degrees of clarity. The
ordering proceeds directly from God, the absolute clarity, to the basest things. The
monads are windowless (autarkic), so the human body and soul had to be connected
by a pre-established harmony set perfectly by God. Leibniz used the analogy of two
ideally designed, synchronized clocks that run totally independently of each other.
In believing that all natural events are mechanistic, he contributed to the founda-
tions of dynamics. His universe was a dynamic organism. He based his dynamics on
two scalar quantities, vis viva (in modern notation mv2 , where m = quantity of
matter and v = velocity, essentially twice kinetic energy) and work function (now
known as potential energy). He understood neither in its modern sense. As a
unifying principle for his dynamics, Leibniz posited the conservation of vis viva.
In mathematics Leibniz independently of Newton invented and named an early
stage of differential calculus. Integration and differentiation, he recognized, are
directly inverse operations, the fundamental theorem of calculus. He published his
first articles on calculus in Acta Eruditorum in 1684, ‘Nova methodus …’, and in
1686, ‘De geometria recondita …’, which addressed the inverse tangent problem or

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integral calculus. But these were so difficult that almost only Jakob (1655–1705) and
Johann I Bernoulli (1667–1748) could understand them. Leibniz was a master
notation builder, whose additions included the cap ‘S’ (∫ ) for the integral sign and
the d notation, dx, dy, and dt for differentials. In a series of papers dating to 1695, he
obtained the result π/4 = 1 − 1/3 + 1/5 − … (Leibniz’s series). During the eighteenth
century on the Continent, first the Bernoulli brothers, and most of all Leonhard
Euler, Jean d’Alembert (1717–83), and Joseph-Louis (Luigi) Lagrange (1736–1813),
adopted and expanded his notation and incorporated his results in their rapid and
extensive elaboration of calculus.
From his student days in Jena and Leipzig, Christian Wolff was known as a
brilliant epigone of the great Leibniz, who recommended him for a position at the
University of Halle in Saxony, held by Wolff from 1717 to 1723. He was brought to
lecture on mathematics, which was in a poor state in Halle’s curriculum, and the new
calculus. He wrote his first books in German rather than Latin (figure 1.6). He was
the first to attempt to establish German as the main language for instruction and
scholarly research. The shift from Latin to the vernacular was spreading. When
Frederick William I, the King of Prussia, exiled him from Halle for disputes with the
Lutheran Pietists, he proceeded to the University of Marburg, where he was a
professor of philosophy and natural sciences from 1724 to 1740. He lectured on
mathematics, physics, astronomy, geography, politics, philosophy, psychology, and
aesthetics. Wolff was a talented and popular teacher who drew to his classes students
from across Europe and Russia. His academic reputation soon began to grow.
Leibniz was the first president of the Berlin Society of Sciences from 1700 to 1716.
In 1710/11 he was named an ordinary member, and in 1711 a foreign member of the
Royal Society of London. In 1716 after several meetings with Peter the Great,

Figure 1.6. Christian Wolff.

Source: https://www.biography.com/people/christian-wolff-9535799.

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 Leonhard Euler’s Letters to a German Princess

Leibniz urged the Czar to accept Wolff as a scientific adviser in planning his new
science academy in St. Petersburg. In 1723 Peter sent his secretaries to offer Wolff
the vice presidency of the projected institution. Wolff declined all offers but agreed
to recommend members from western Europe and became a foreign member of the
Petersburg Imperial Academy of Sciences (hereafter Petersburg Academy) from its
founding in 1725 as professor of mathematics with an academic financial pension.
Three of the six new members whom he recommended were Daniel Bernoulli (1700–82),
Jakob Hermann (1668–1733), and Joseph Nicolas Delisle (1688–1768). As was the
case in many western European universities and colleges, most of the new members
were not Cartesians: they were partisans of Newton, Leibniz, and Wolff, who in
1733 was named a foreign member of the Paris Academy.
Wolff introduced into German philosophy its spirit of exactness, rigor, and
clarity, its Gründlichkeit. His many writings included subjects in mathematics and
the sciences. In 1710 he wrote the four-volume Der Anfangs-Gründe aller mathema-
tischen Wissenschaften (Elements of All the Mathematical Sciences), which covers
arithmetic, astronomy, hydraulics, and algebra. It is more for an engineer than a
mathematician. It explains Wolff’s axiomatic method. From the start of his career
he recognized the value of good textbooks. In 1716 he edited a practical treatise,
Mathematisches Lexikon … (Mathematical Dictionary …) that contained useful
knowledge about the theoretical foundations of cartography (projections and
construction), geodesy, astronomy, geography, and hydrography. It did not include
Leibniz’s new calculus, which had appeared in Acta Eruditorum. It explained new
mathematical words and reports on the history of the exact sciences. It was printed
in Frankfurt and Leipzig. The Mathematisches Lexikon … was re-edited in 1738.
From 1713 to 1725 Wolff published the seven volumes of his Vernünftige Gedanken
(Rational Thoughts), including Vernünftige Gedanken von der Wirkung der Natur
(Rational Thoughts on the Operation of Nature, 1723), which could not be used as a
textbook because the books had new terms in German that were complicated and too
difficult to follow; they were not available in Latin, the official language of learning.
Wolff, who was famous as a lecturer, had articles on physics that included his
Principia Dynamica (Principles of Dynamics), which appeared in the Commentarii of
the Petersburg Academy for 1726 and was published two years later in 1728, as was
his Cosmologia Generalis (Universal Cosmology), in 1730 and again in 1737, and his
Elementa Matheseos Universae (Universal Mathematical Elements) in 1731. The
Cosmologia Generalis consisted of two parts: the scientific and the experimental
(general principles of visible nature). Wolff’s articles described the mechanics of the
visible world as a perfect machine and gave the laws of motion by which it operates.
No scientific explanations or proofs were given, but descriptions of experiments were
useful and interesting.
With some good and some poor reasons, Wolff’s philosophy has been treated as
Leibnizian or Leibnizo-Wolffian. But many of Leibniz’s ideas lay scattered in
writings published posthumously, and thus were not yet known in 1716. Another
title given is Wolffian Dogmatic Philosophy, corrected or opposed by the views of
Leibniz as posthumously discovered. Leibniz’s New Essays Concerning Human
Understanding, completed in 1707, was, for example, not published until 1765. His

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 Leonhard Euler’s Letters to a German Princess

first collected works, Leibnitii Opera Omnia, was prepared by Ludovici Dutens in
Geneva in 1768. The word ‘dogmatic’ here does not have the present meaning. It
signifies extremely rational.
Major differences existed between the philosophy of Leibniz and that of Wolff.
All knowledge, for example, Wolff divided into mathematical, philosophical, and
historical. Mathematical knowledge is the quantity of things, and historical is
empirical. The foundation of Wolff’s mathematics was geometric with its strict
deduction and not the new analysis of the infinite, developed by Leibniz and two
generations of mathematicians on the Continent during the Enlightenment, above
all by Euler. Analysis of the infinite gained autonomy as a branch of mathematics
and formed a triumvirate with algebra and geometry which displaced geometry from
its two-millennia primacy in mathematics. While Leibniz and Wolff were both
rationalists, central to Leibniz’s metaphysics was the principle of sufficient reason
(PSR), which Wolff considered self-evident and derived from the principle of
contradiction (POC). Thus, PSR lost a definitive axiomatic place in his metaphysics.
The theory of matter saw a major separation. Leibniz founded his metaphysics on
monads, or later in his career geometric points of force, that are infinite in number.
Wolff posited a finite number of monads as interacting primitive corpuscles,
essentially atoms. Since Leibniz’s monads are windowless, an ideal pre-established
harmony set by God is required to connect them. Wolff’s monads or atomic
elements interact and dynamically influence each other. In physics textbooks three of
the writers whom Wolff influenced were Ludwig Philipp Thümmig (1690–1728), the
Russian Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov (1711–65), and the Prussian minister and
teacher Jean-Henri Samuel Formey (1711–91), who are noted later in this chapter.
For the early Petersburg Academy Wolff had an important role besides teaching
the Russian students sent to him and publishing his own books. He advised the
academy on what books, textbooks, and scientific instruments for experiments in
physics, chemistry, astronomy, and medicine to bring from Europe to St. Petersburg.
The result is the so-called ‘Scientific Collection’.

1.3 Physics textbooks in Europe and North America

After physics during the seventeenth century surpassed that of Aristotle and the
scholastics, alongside, at its end, with the writings of Rohault and Newton becoming
known, eighteenth-century textbooks in Europe and the North American English
colonies became more scientific. A prominent example is the work of the Dutch
mathematician, natural philosopher, and lawyer Willem Jacob Storm van ‘s
Gravesande (1688–1742), who studied at Leiden and the Hague and was, in 1717,
appointed a member of the mathematics and astronomy faculty at the University of
Leiden, in part recommended by Newton. ‘s Gravesande, an expert in the theories of
heat and elasticity, invented the heliostat in 1719 and his ring to prove the expansion
of bodies and air by heat.
Despite its title, ‘s Gravesande’s two-volume textbook Physices Elementa
Mathematica, Experimentis Confirmata sive Introductio ad Philosophiam Newtonianam
(Mathematical Elements of Natural Philosophy Confirm’d by Experiments with an

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 Leonhard Euler’s Letters to a German Princess

Introduction to Newtonian Philosophy), published in 1719–21 and 1723, consists

almost entirely of descriptions of experiments. Though he found the cause of gravity a
mystery, ‘s Gravesande defended and applied Newton’s mechanics against Cartesian
critics. Not limited to Newton’s mechanics with its laws of motion and gravitational
attraction, this book also addresses parts of chapters to simple machines, astronomy—
especially Newton on celestial motions—lenses and prisms in optics, properties of
fluids (hydrostatics), sound (acoustics) and chemistry. It studied air (pneumatics), fire,
electricity, and magnetism, all subjects of growing interest and factual knowledge
during the Enlightenment search to reduce inaccuracies and errors as well as to
achieve greater precision approaching exactness. Theoretical findings in these fields
were at an early stage. ‘s Gravesande’s textbook was one of the first treatises to confine
itself almost entirely to the field of inanimate nature.
The textbook Physices Elementa Mathematica and ‘s Gravesande’s laboratory
drew scholars from across Europe, including Voltaire (1694–1778) and Samuel
König (1712–57), and were essential to making the University of Leiden a citadel of
Newtonian science. The text was accepted for use in many colleges and universities
across Europe. ‘s Gravesande’s next textbook, Philosophia Newtonianae
Institutianae Institutiones, published in London in 1726, 1737, and 1747 drew
principally upon Newton’s Principia and Opticks.
The French-born English natural philosopher, cleric, and freemason John (Jean)
Theophilus Desagulier (1683–1744) was another popularizer and promoter of
Newtonian science across Europe. He lived in England from 1685 and was educated
at Oxford University. In 1714 Isaac Newton, the president of the Royal Society of
London, invited him to be his experimental assistant and demonstrator. Soon
thereafter Desagulier was elected a fellow of that society. He wrote Course in
Experimental Philosophy, published in 1725, and articles for the Royal Society’s
Philosophical Transactions, and he gave public lectures on mechanics, astronomy,
hydrostatics, and optics. All of these followed the experimental methodology and
were based largely on principles and calculations from Book 2 of the second edition
of Newton’s Principia in 1713 and its third edition in 1719. In the debate with
Cartesian critics at the Paris Academy, Desagulier defended Newton on the shape of
Earth as a melon flattened at the poles against the Cartesian elongated lemon.
Desagulier’s study of electricity led to his discovery that electric current flows
freely in some materials, like metals, which he called conductors in his Dissertation
Concerning Electricity, printed in 1742. In that treatise he found that current does
not travel freely through some materials like amber and glass, for which he
introduced the term insulator. He proved the connection between kinetic energy
and the velocity of an object. His principal contribution to science teaching was his
invention of a planetarium, or orrery, to explain the motion in our Copernican
heliocentric solar system.
The Dutch mathematician and natural philosopher Pieter (Petrus) van
Musschenbroek (1692–1761) was the third leading scholar in physics education in
Europe and North America and a principal figure in the transmission of Newton’s
science to the Continent in the early eighteenth century. Musschenbroek studied
medicine and afterward philosophy at the University of Leiden under ‘s Gravesande

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 Leonhard Euler’s Letters to a German Princess

and his advisor Hermann Boerhaave (1668–1738). He attended lectures of

Desagulier and Newton in England in 1717. He taught mathematics and philosophy
at the University of Duisberg from 1719 to 1723 and was promoted to professor of
both at Utrecht, in 1723, and to professor of astronomy, in 1726, and to professor of
mathematics at Leiden in 1739. He was early interested in scientific instruments. His
father had made microscopes and telescopes. He examined capillary action,
cohesion, magnetism, and electrostatic phenomena. In 1746 Musschenbroek
together with colleagues in Holland invented the electric condenser, which Abbé
Jean-Antoine Nollet (1700–70) in his books called the Leiden jar. Nollet showed its
effect through 180 soldiers holding hands at Versailles.
Musschenbroek’s two-volume Epitome Elementorum Physico-Mathematicorum,
first published in 1726, with the later titles, after alterations, of Introductio ad
Philosophiam Naturalem (Introduction to Natural Philosophy) in 1729 and
Institutiones physicae, was his first major piece of writing. It made him one of the
most influential European scholars in the natural sciences. He studied magnetism,
capillary action, and cohesion. This was followed by his textbook Elementa Physica
(Elements of Physics), published in 1734. Here he called for ‘accurate observations
and careful experiments’, especially, for example, as concerned to magnetic
attraction and to fine nature (the magnetic Musschenbroek’s law). This book can
be regarded as the first systematic exposition in a physics course. It gave an example
of the expansion of iron from heating and described the electrical phenomenon of
the Leiden jar, which collected a powerful electrical force in the bottom of the bottle.
Musschenbroek also included other problems in optics, electricity, electrostatic
phenomena, and heat theories. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of
London in 1734. After his announced creation of the Leiden jar, he was elected in
1746 an ordinary foreign member of the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences and
Belle Lettres in Berlin and the next year of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
He was named a foreign associate member of the Petersburg Imperial Academy of
Sciences in Russia in 1754.
While physics received a substantial experimental foundation in the eighteenth
century, it was not yet an independent area of science, especially in college education
in Europe. As a rule, physics was taught by mathematicians. For example,
‘s Gravesande and Musschenbroek were both professors of mathematics at
Leiden. Nevertheless, three physics texts had appeared in the early eighteenth
century: ‘s Gravesande’s Mathematical Bases of Physics Proved Experimentally,
1720, Desagulier’s Course of Experimental Philosophy, 1725, and Musschenbroek’s
Elements of Physics, 1734.
These three textbooks contained significant descriptions of experimental appara-
tuses and mechanisms, which were used to prove laws of physics and show their
applications. During this period physics changed from a metaphysical Aristotelian
subject, not at all like that taught in medieval universities, to a full-fledged science.
Likely the inventions in electricity and their theoretical explanations by Desagulier
and Musschenbroek were known to Benjamin Franklin and contributed to his
success in experimental electricity. Franklin performed his famous kite experiment
and wrote Experiments and Observations on Electricity in 1754.

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A brief history of physics textbooks used in North America during the eighteenth-
century Enlightenment follows1. It begins with textbooks employed at Harvard,
Yale, Princeton, and William and Mary colleges. The teaching of physics might be
divided into two parts. The first period began with the opening of Harvard
University in 1638 and extended to the beginning of the downfall of Aristotelian
physics which was in progress before 1687. The second, a transitional period, during
which physics was evolving into a separate modern science, culminated around
1740.
The first physics taught at Yale was Aristotelian. The less metaphysical works
were Leclerc’s Physica and Rohault’s System of Philosophy and Natural Philosophy.
Like Harvard and Yale, William and Mary taught Aristotelian physics until 1736.
The University of Pennsylvania and some colleges established shortly thereafter
taught scientific physics from their openings. So did Princeton, which began in 1747.
The changes in astronomy at Harvard before 1659 marked the beginning of the
end of the Aristotelian period. Gradually the works of Copernicus, Galileo Galilei,
and Johannes Kepler were introduced and brought a consequent rejection of the
Ptolemaic geocentric system. In physics Charles Morton’s semi-scientific
Compendium Physicae was already in use. This treatise was not printed but copied
by students. An extract from the manuscript of a Compendium made in 1699 is
shown in McCarthy2. Yale moved away from Aristotelian physics in the 1720s,
William and Mary in 1736.
But Aristotelian science was not entirely forgotten. The transitional period
combined the methods and principles of both the old physics and the Newtonian
new physics. Some sections of the textbooks were more scientific, as they were based
on experiments, observations, and mathematical principles, whereas other sections
were Aristotelian. Rohault’s System of Philosophy and Natural Philosophy, trans-
lated into English in London by John Samuel Clarke in 1723, for example, includes
opinions of authorities, not unlike the practice in medieval and pre-Newtonian
books. But the section on geometrical optics differs from the old traditions; it offers
many diagrams and illustrations of reflection in mirrors and refraction in lenses. The
astronomical section is also scientific, deriving some principles mathematically.
Another indicator that in the early eighteenth century physics was becoming a
separate science was the frequent mention of lab (‘Philosophical’) apparatuses.
Experimental apparatus could be found at William and Mary3. Pedagogically this
meant that the teaching of natural philosophy was shifting from opinion endorsed
by authorities to observations and demonstrations. This eventually led to the
development of laboratory-based teaching later in the nineteenth century.
The transitional period ended in Harvard and Yale before 1740. Harvard used
‘s Gravesande’s textbook before 1737. Its editions, translated by Desagulier from
Latin to English, later employed in Yale, were published in London in 1726, 1737,

1
McCarthy J J 1985 Physics in American Colleges before 1750 Physics History ed M N Phillips (College Park,
MD: AAPT) 163–7.
2
Ibid.
3
Ibid.

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and 1747. These editions explained experiments properly, giving much attention to
astronomy, mechanics, and optics that were supported by experiments, and
improving observations, especially in astronomy with better telescopes.
After 1750, Benjamin Franklin (1706–90) is a well-known, early advocate of
science education in the American colonies. American colonial secondary schools
did not offer science courses until the founding of the first academy in 1749 in
Philadelphia. This ‘spilling’ of science teaching down to secondary schools evolved
through the academy movement.
Through a series of discoveries and his famous kite experiment, Benjamin
Franklin showed that electricity was not just a plaything but a natural force, like
gravity. His kite experiment involved flying a kite during a storm with personal
safeguards to prove that lightning is electricity. Franklin’s work was to illustrate the
Baconian and Enlightenment ideal that pure, theoretical science could have
enormous practical importance and consequences. His invention of the lightning
rod with pointed, upright rods of iron drastically reduced the threat of fire to
churches and other tall buildings. What Franklin modestly described as his
‘electrical amusement’ made him a famous man of science and physicist. As the
French Royal Minister of Finance Anne Robert Jacques Turgot (1727–81) would
say to the kite flyer from Philadelphia, ‘He snatched lightning from the sky and
scepter from tyrants.’
The years from 1749 through 1757 were the most eventful period of Franklin’s
life. In addition to his research in the sciences, Franklin was thinking about ways to
improve the schooling in his adopted town of Philadelphia. As a first step, in 1749 he
published an article that outlined in detail his ideas on why such a school was needed
and how to organize and fund it. And what would it teach? ‘Those things that are
likely to be most useful,’ he explained, including astronomy, physics, mathematics,
grammar, history, and geography. Unlike the other traditional colonial colleges,
such as Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and William and Mary, the new school should be
nonsectarian, the first such college in the American colonies. Franklin’s proposals
found enough support among prosperous Philadelphians that money was quickly
raised to establish the school. The new academy, the Academy and College of
Philadelphia, opened its doors early in 1751. In 1791 the college assumed the name it
still bears: the University of Pennsylvania.
While the textbooks of Rohault, ‘s Gravesande, Desaguliers, and van
Musschenbroek, reviewed above, were used traditionally in England, Denmark,
Holland, Sweden and other countries, as well as in North America, Christian Wolff
remained influential in natural philosophy in north German lands, especially
Brandenburg-Prussia and Hanover, during the early and mid-eighteenth century.
Wolff’s colleague Ludwig Thümmig was largely responsible for this. Wolff had
written a textbook for teaching physics and natural philosophy at Marburg
University. From 1713 to 1725 Wolff had also published the seven volumes of his
Vernünftige Gedanken (Rational Thoughts), including Vernünftige Gedanken von der
Wirkung der Natur. But these were abstruse and tough to follow. Thümmig ignored
them and the complicated theoretical and philosophical chapters of the textbook by
Wolff for Marburg University. He shortened that textbook, methodically reworked

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 Leonhard Euler’s Letters to a German Princess

chapters, added advice on practical experiments, made useful comments on special

practical parts, and published this compilation in Latin as an independent title, his
two-volume Phisicae Institutiones Philosophiae Wolffianae in Ursus Academicos
Adornatae, which was published in Frankfurt and Leipzig in 1725 and 1726.
Thümmig’s short, easy to understand, and simply stated textbook was to be widely
adopted in European, particularly German, educational programs. It was the first
German textbook in physics. Its more readable account of Wolff’s natural
philosophy was popular. Thümmig wrote in Latin, because Wolff’s new German
terms were confusing. Wolff was building the German language for scholarly
studies. Thümmig’s first volume attempted to explain regular and strange phenom-
ena in nature. It was perhaps Wolff who suggested that he address cosmology before
psychology, and divide psychology into its empirical and rational branches.
Ludwig Philipp Thümmig (1697–1728) was one of the first and closest followers
of Christian Wolff. After receiving his master’s degree in 1721, Thümmig was an
adjunct in philosophy at the University of Halle, where he mainly lectured on
mathematics and physics. Also, in 1721, he was named a foreign or external member
of the Royal Prussian Society of Sciences in Berlin. Thümmig followed his mentor
Wolff, who was expelled from Halle, to Marburg in 1723. The next year, on Wolff’s
recommendation, Thümmig was named ordinary professor of philosophy and
mathematics at the Collegium Carolinum in Kassel. He wished to expand further
on his studies of Wolff’s philosophy beyond the Phisicae Institutiones Philosophiae
Wolffianae, but could not, for he died in 1728 at the age of 30.
To 1740 no national textbook in physics existed in Russia. While the two most
notable physics texts used in St. Petersburg at the Academic University were
Newtonian, the future outstanding Russian polymath, chemist, geographer, miner-
alogist, natural philosopher, physicist, artist, sculptor, and poet Mikhail Vasilyevich
Lomonosov would make connections to Wolffian science, but opposed its monadic
doctrine (figure 1.7). He together with two other Russians studied under Wolff at
Marburg from 1736 to 1739. The three were sent personally by the Petersburg
Imperial Academy of Sciences to learn mainly about Wolff’s ideas in the sciences.
Lomonosov became a follower of Wolff, who supported his studies in the sciences
and languages, German and Latin. Lomonosov attended and made careful notes on
all of Wolff’s lectures, experiments, and treatises on the sciences and mathematics.
He returned to St. Petersburg in 1741 and became an academic adjunct to the
Petersburg Academy from 1742 to 1745. He began teaching physics and chemistry at
the Academic University of the Petersburg Academy. He understood that success in
teaching depended not only on the teacher’s pedagogical level, but also the art of
identifying interesting physical experiments and having quality textbooks written for
students.
In 1745 no national physics textbooks could be found in the library of the
Petersburg Academy. Only Lomonosov’s single copy of Thümmig’s Phisicae
Institutiones Philosophiae Wolffianae that he had taken from Marburg was available.
He decided to translate part of the first volume of Thümmig’s textbook of 1725 from
Latin to Russian and to publish it at the Petersburg Academy. His was the
authorized translation. But it was also more. Lomonosov decided to shorten some

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 Leonhard Euler’s Letters to a German Princess

Figure 1.7. Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov.

Source: http://www.kunstkamera.ru/images/floor/3_XIV_01b.j.

sections and to expand the experimental part significantly by developing his own
demonstration techniques and experiments with fluids, air, light, magnets, and
optics. He introduced new scientific terminology, remarked on especially difficult
sections of Thümmig, and added comments on discoveries in physics since Thümmig
wrote in 1725. He wrote a new preface. His work reflects the high level of physical
knowledge of Lomonosov and his skill in translation from Latin.
The title of this Wolffian text is 276 Zamеtok po fizike i korpuskulyarnoy filosofii
(276 Notes on Corpuscular Philosophy and Physics). Its shorter title in Russian is
Wolfianskaya Experimentalnaya Fysyka (Wolffian Experimental Physics) (figure 1.8).
It was published in 1746 with 600 copies in the first printing and 1200 the next year.
This book became the first physics textbook or physics manual in Russia. It was
edited twice by different scholars in an enlarged version in 1760. It was a new
translation prepared from Latin by professional translators with advice from
Lomonosov. The new book had the title in Russian of Wolffian Theoretical
Physics. While Lomonosov stressed the sixth chapter of Thümmig, the new book
was from the seventh. A third edition appeared in 1765. Each new series printed
1200 books. On Euler’s recommendation, Lomonosov’s article on the elastic force of
air was published in the New Commentarii of the Petersburg Academy in 1748, and

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 Leonhard Euler’s Letters to a German Princess

Figure 1.8. Wolffian experimental physics, 1760.

Source: http://vmest.ru/nuda/v-techenie-20-let-on-obuchal-studentov-fizike-himii-naturaleno/5.jpg.

another paper on electricity in 1756. Both articles influenced Euler in his preparation
of the Letters to a German Princess. Lomonosov also reorganized the Petersburg
Academy.
When his textbook was published in 1746, Lomonosov began lecturing on physics
and chemistry at the Academic University not in Latin but Russian. Despite troubles
with the Petersburg Academy’s administrators, who briefly imprisoned him,
Lomonosov became in 1746 with the help of Euler an ordinary member of the
academy and afterward the rector of the Academic University. He was assisted in
preparing experiments and demonstrations by the unfortunate Georg Wilhelm
Richmann (1711–53), the head of the Physical Cabinet at the Petersburg
Academy. Euler, who recommended Lomonosov’s papers on the air and heat and
cold for publication, supported him to become an ordinary member of the
Petersburg Academy in 1746. So did Wolff. Richmann died tragically in a lightning
experiment similar to Benjamin Franklin’s. For a time, his death also halted
research on lightning at the royal science academies in Paris and Berlin. The
Physical Cabinet of the academy had increased its collection of instruments and
devices to over 800 by 1745, and these were available to Lomonosov for preparing
and presenting his demonstrations and experiments4.
At first Lomonosov’s textbook, Wolffian Experimental Physics, was only used at
the Academic University, but it was soon widely adopted for courses in many
schools and universities, including Moscow University, founded by Lomonosov in
1755. For more than 30 years after it appeared, no new manuals were written in
Russian. The first was published in 1785 by Mikhail Golovin, the nephew and
follower of Lomonosov. It had three editions, 1785, 1787, and 1797, with 300 books
printed for every edition. Still, Lomonosov’s Wolffian Experimental Physics

4
De Clercq P 2002 Scientific Instruments from Holland for Tsar Peter the Great and the Academy of Sciences
in St. Petersburg Proc. XVIII Scientific Instruments Symposium (Moscow, 2002) pp 12–26.

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 Leonhard Euler’s Letters to a German Princess

remained as a famous Russian memorial treatise and was successfully used at

schools and universities in Russia for the next hundred years.
Euler was in Berlin in 1746, when Lomonosov’s textbook was published. Its
second edition, printed in 1760 and probably read by Euler, turned out to be a useful
introduction to his Letters to a German Princess in 1768. Euler had done much of his
research in physics during his first stay in St. Petersburg from 1727 to 1741. This will
be covered below in the third chapter. Although the Letters to a German Princess
was written in French, it continued the Russian line of scientific textbooks.
In Prussia Jean Formey (1711–97) was the secretary of the philosophy department
of the Berlin Academy from 1744 and the historiographer from 1745 and perpetual
secretary of the academy, on the recommendation of Maupertuis, from 1748. He
held the post of secretary so long that Voltaire quipped that it was indeed perpetual.
Formey attempted to popularize and explain Wolffian philosophy. He wrote
La belle Wolfienne, in 6 volumes, published from 1741–53. It began as a philosophical
romance, a form that was dropped by the fourth volume. The main goal of this
work, written in French, was to educate women. The Wolffian position with the
opposition of Euler faced challenges in the 1750 and early 60s. A speech to celebrate
King Frederick II’s birthday in 1766, ‘Reconciliation of the Philosophies of Leibniz
and Newton’, expressed a position not yet achieved. The debate over whether
Newton or Leibniz deserved priority for the invention of differential calculus
continued.
From 1770 to 1772, Formey published in two volumes a concise version of
Wolff’s physics from Thümmig titled Abrégé de Physique. It dealt with both
experimental and theoretical physics. Euler had departed for Russia four years
earlier, so his opposition did not have to be faced. Formey had been the pastor of the
church that Euler attended in Berlin, and he was the father-in-law of Euler’s eldest
son, Johann Albrecht. From 1770 to 1773, the Abrégé de Physique was translated
from French into German.

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 IOP Concise Physics

Leonhard Euler’s Letters to a German Princess

A milestone in the history of physics textbooks and more
Ronald S Calinger, Ekaterina (Katya) Denisova and Elena N Polyakhova

Chapter 2
The two princesses and the Letters

2.1 The two princesses: errors, lineage, and biographies

From the death of his two royal pupils (around 1810) to 2002, two widespread
mistakes existed concerning to whom Euler had sent the letters. One was that
the princess was an imaginary reader. This fits into the Enlightenment tradition of
‘gallant’ literature of anonymous private letters to an imaginary reader. An example
is the Marquise Émilie du Chȃtelet’s book Lettres à mon fils (Letters to my son,
1743). These letters were published anonymously, a custom of the time partly
to avoid charges of arrogance. The ‘son’ was actually known: Mme du Chȃtelet
(1706–49) was a lover and intellectual companion of Voltaire (1694–1778) and wrote
her magnum opus, Institutions de Physique (Foundations of Physics, 1740), which she
changed to become the revised Institutions Physique, 1742. It offered a metaphysical
basis for Isaac Newton’s dynamics. For 200 years no one could figure out who the
certain ‘German Princess’ was. The other misconception was that there was only one
princess. This account considers both errors and their resolution in 2002. It reviews
the exact salutation given by Euler to the addressee: simply ‘Madame’. To this
Condorcet added in the preface to his ‘Eulogy of Euler’ in 1783, ‘la princesse
d’Anhalt-Dessau, nièce du roi de Prusse1.’ But no one identified the princess.
Language presented a difficulty. The French indefinite article ‘une’ on the title
page contributed to two problems. It can be translated into English, German or
Russian as the numerical ‘one’ or indefinite ‘some’ or ‘a’. In Russian the title of the
book was initially translated as Letters to some [indefinite] Princess, which was a
common trope in the literature of the time. It raised doubts about the recipient of
Euler’s letters. Was it a real or an imaginary person? The gallant tradition in
Enlightenment literature allowed for the latter. During the Enlightenment, the
sending of anonymous letters to an imaginary reader was popular. In none of the

1
Musielak D 2014 ‘Euler and the German Princess’, arXiv preprint (arXiv:1406.7417).

doi:10.1088/2053-2571/aae6d2ch2 2-1 ª Morgan & Claypool Publishers 2019

 Leonhard Euler’s Letters to a German Princess

234 letters were the names of the addressees supplied. In a letter of 1782 and again in
1783, in his eulogy for Euler, Condorcet indicated in general who proposed writing
the instructional letters and who the recipient was. This actually implied two
princesses, but names were not supplied. Not until Condorcet’s account was
explained and justified in detail did the imaginary literary interpretation end.
The other mistake was that there was only a single princess. Researchers looked
at the French linguistics of the words ‘une Princesse d’Allemagne’, and not ‘une
Princesse allemagne’. The first version of her title suggests that the princess belonged
to the Prussian king’s dynasty, being ‘of the royal blood’ and not simply ‘some’
German princess, ‘une Princesse allemagne’. The title ‘Princess of Germany’ is
precise and indicates the recipient is of royal blood, but Germany, while the name
was used at the time, was not yet a single political entity. The Germans had been
divided for two centuries by the Peace of Westphalia, in 1645. It would be another
century until the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and 1871 and the unification of
Germany under Otto von Bismarck. But the core of Germany, Brandenburg-
Prussia, existed. German scholars discovered the difference in to whom the letters
were sent2.
The central names in the genealogy of the princesses start with Prince Frederick
Henry of Brandenburg-Schwedt and Margrave, 1771–88, who was a ‘prince of royal
blood’ and Prince of Prussia. Frederick had jailed him for several weeks for the
disorder in his regiment. Frederick II, the Great, (1712–86) referred to him in the
French manner as ‘mon cousin’, a traditional courtesy in Prussia at the king’s court
but accurate in this case. Frederick II and the margrave were half-first cousins. The
margrave was a patron of the arts, especially the theatre. He was not interested in his
regiment in the military, and Frederick II thought little of him.
Prussian King Frederick II, the Great (1712–86), and Prince Frederick Henry
(1709–88) of Brandenburg were half-second cousins. They were not personally close.
The family connection between them began with Frederick-William (1620–88), the
Great Elector (in German, ‘Kurfuerst’, a person who belonged to the college of
several electors, who voted for the Holy Roman Emperor in Vienna.) Since 1640 he
had been the last Elector of Brandenburg. He was the paternal great-grandfather of
both Frederick II and Frederick Henry.
The oldest son of the Great Elector Frederick-William came from his first
marriage to Princess Louise Henriette of Nassau-Orange (1627–67). He was the
Prince Elector (Kurfuerst) Frederick III (1657–1713) of Brandenburg from 1668 to
1701. In 1701, aided by the legal and historical writings of Gottfried Leibniz, he was
elevated to be the first King in Prussia (Hohenzollern dynasty). As King of Prussia

2
Seven names of faculty at the Vavilov History of Science and Technology Institute of the Russian Academy
of Sciences, St. Petersburg division prepared the 2002 edition of the Letters to a German Princess. Four of these
individuals and their articles are Judith Kopelevich, ‘History of the Creation of “Letters” and their
Addressees’, pp 535–54; Nina Nevskaya, ‘Saint-Petersburg Sources and Origins of Euler’s Physical and
Philosophical Concepts’, pp 555–609; Elena Ojhigova, ‘Editions of “Letters…” and Their Assessment’,
pp 610–6; and Jacob Smorodinsky, ‘“Letters to a German Princess…” of L Euler and Science of the XVIII
Century’, pp 617–710.

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 Leonhard Euler’s Letters to a German Princess

he was Frederick I: he reigned from 1701 to 1713. He belonged to the first generation
after the Great Elector.
The second oldest son of the Great Elector Frederick-William came from his
second marriage to Princess Dorothea-Sophie of Holstein-Gluecksburg (1636–89).
He was Phillip-William (1669–1711), a half-brother of King Frederick I. He
belonged to the first generation after the Great Elector.
From the second generation after the Great Elector, two lines began: the
Hohenzollern royal line (line 1) and the Margraves of Brandenburg-Schwedt line
(line 2). Phillip-William (the first person from line 2) became a general, he was
Margrave and first owner of Brandenburg-Schwedt land.
The third generation followed with the Royal line 1 continues with King of
Prussia Frederick-William I (1688–1740), who was King from 1713, and known as
the ‘soldier King’. In line 2 Prince Phillip (1690–1771) was Margrave of
Brandenburg-Schwedt from 1711. Both were third-generation grandsons of Great
Elector Frederick-William and half-first cousins.
The fourth generation had, in royal line 1, King Frederick II, the Great (1712–86),
King of Prussia since 1740, and in line 2, Prince Frederick Henry (1709–88),
Margrave of Brandenburg-Schwedt from 1771. Both were fourth generation, King
Frederick II and Prince Frederick Henry (Euler’s friend), great-grandsons of the
Great Elector (Kurfuerst) of Brandenburg Frederick-William I and half-second
cousins.
In Berlin Frederick Henry had attended several sittings of the Royal Prussian
Academy of Sciences and Belles Lettres from 1748 to 1765 and had become Euler’s
friend. He stopped going to the academy shortly before Euler returned to Russia.
Frederick Henry was the father of the two princesses and had introduced them to
Euler at one of the meetings of the Berlin Academy (figure 2.1).
They were, then, half-second cousins of Frederick II. Their mother Marie
Leopoldine (1716–86) was the daughter of the outstanding General Field

Figure 2.1. Friedrich August Calau, painting of the building of the Berlin Academy of Sciences and Arts,
Unter den Linden, mid-eighteenth century.
Source: http://www.bbaw.de/forschung/berlinerklassik/uebersicht.

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 Leonhard Euler’s Letters to a German Princess

Marshall Prince Leopold I (1676–1747), a military mentor to Frederick II, known as

‘the old Dessauer’. Born princess of Anhalt-Dessau, she became princess of
Brandenburg-Schwedt upon her marriage, but was not ‘of royal blood’. After the
birth of her second daughter, she lived separately from the family for reasons given
below.
The two German princesses taught in the Letters were Frederike Charlotte
Leopoldine Louise, born 15 years earlier in 1745 in the town of Schwedt, north of
Berlin and not far from the Oder River, in a line of the Prussian royal family, and her
sister, Louise Henriette Wilhelmine, who in 1760 was ten. The parents, Frederick
Henry of Brandenburg-Schwedt and Marie Leopoldine of Anhalt-Dessau were wed
in 1739, but the marriage was violently quarrelsome. After the second birth, Marie
Leopoldine had post partum depression and perhaps never recovered her sanity. She
was banned from living at the palace in Kolobzerg Fortress in Silesia on the
southern Baltic, remaining there for the rest of her life. Frederick II wanted to obtain
Schwedt, perhaps a reason to keep the couple apart to assure that there were no male
heirs. The mother was not ‘of royal blood’.
After her parents’ breakup, their daughter Frederike Charlotte was sent to the
imperial Herford Abbey (Bielefeld, Westphalia), which belonged to the Holy
Roman Empire, apparently to continue to be educated there (figure 2.2). Earlier a
tutor and governess must have helped teach her. She also undertook studies at the
royal Prussian court. In the eighteenth century, noble women were sent to abbeys to
receive their education and sent only on special occasions to their homes and
families. Some noble or prosperous family women who were not to be married also

Figure 2.2. Friederike Charlotte Leopoldine Louise of Brandenburg-Schwedt.

Source: https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1406/1406.7417.pdf.

2-4
 Leonhard Euler’s Letters to a German Princess

might live as nuns at a convent, which was a place of refuge as well as learning.
Frederike Charlotte never married and was not from a male heir or marriage of
Anhalt-Dessau. In 1755 she was named the coadjutor of the Herford Abbey, which
made her the future successor to the princess abbess, which occurred in 1764, two
years after Euler completed writing the Letters to a German Princess. His instruction
must have helped her to prepare to run the Herford Abbey. Because of her position
in the clergy, he could not cite her as the addressee of his letters. While the abbey was
Lutheran, Princess Abbess Frederike Charlotte, like her female predecessors and
Euler, was a Calvinist. She administered well and kindly the abbey as a noble court
until 1802, when it was secularized and seized by Prussia, but she received a pension.
In 1806 at age 61, she fled the First French Republican army of Napoleon to Altona
(near Hamburg). The abbey had survived the scourge of smallpox. Frederike
Charlotte died on 23 January 1808 and was buried in the collegiate church at
Herford.
Louise Henriette Wilhelmine, born in 1750, had the title of princess of
Brandenburg-Schwedt (figure 2.3). Only after her marriage on 17 July 1767 to
her cousin Prince Leopold (III) Friedrich Franz von Anhalt-Dessau (1740–1817)
did she become the princess or duchess of Anhalt-Dessau and later also margra-
vine. Her father became the last margrave in 1771, a border military commander
who defended the boundary areas of provinces in his region of the Holy Roman
Empire. From her father, Louise Henriette was already of ‘royal blood’. The

Figure 2.3. Louise Henriette Wilhelmine of Brandenburg-Schwedt.

Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Luise_von_Anhalt-Dessau.jpg.

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 Leonhard Euler’s Letters to a German Princess

search for the specific addressee of the Letters concluded in 2002 with the
determination that Louise Henriette was that person. German scholars discovered
the difference between the titles of the two sisters, the older princess of
Brandenburg-Schwedt and born from her mother of Anhalt-Dessau, and the
younger sister, born princess of Brandenburg-Schwedt and only later becoming
princess (fuerstin) of Anhalt-Dessau because of her marriage. From her father she
was ‘of royal blood’ and a ‘niece of the king of Prussia’ as well. Condorcet in his
‘Éloge’ of Euler in 1783 noted3 that the princess of Anhalt-Dessau and niece of
Frederick II requested some lessons in physics from Euler. It was long believed that
this was Friederike Charlotte, but she was not the princess of Anhalt-Dessau;
Louise Henriette was. She and Prince Leopold III were well educated, and she was
a gifted painter of portraits. They had two children, a daughter who died in
infancy, and a son, Frederick. Louise Henriette visited England in 1775, and later
Switzerland and Italian cities. She lived with her husband in Dessau and then in the
Woerlitz palace in Saxony. They had the palace constructed with a large land-
scaped park. They worked to create a museum of beautiful paintings and a library
of antique, medieval, and modern books. Louise Henriette spent her last years in
the Lisium Castle in Bavaria and kept a salon that held meetings with a circle of
friends, who included Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Alexander von
Humboldt; several such salons headed by women were famous in Enlightenment
literary society across Europe. The French name for these women was female
savants. Louise Henriette died on 21 December 1811 in Dessau and was buried in
the cemetery, now with St. Bartholomew Church.

2.2 The Letters: creation, publication and translation

The request to instruct the daughters in the sciences most likely came from their
father, Frederick Henry, who was a patron of the arts, especially the theatre. He and
Euler, whom he had met at Berlin Academy sittings, loved music. Frederick Henry,
who occasionally visited the Berlin Academy from 1748, became friends with Euler.
Frederick Henry brought his daughters to the Berlin Academy and introduced them
to Euler, who visited the father’s stately mansion in the center of Berlin, the
Margrave’s Wellersche palace, also called the Prinzessinenpalais, which the father
had purchased in 1755. There the two heard musical performances and possibly
played duets. Euler’s instrument was the clavier, which aside from chess was his only
hobby. After he became the last margrave in 1771, Frederick Henry built an
operetta theater for 400 in the orangery of his castle in Schwedt 1777.
In 1783 Condorcet’s ‘Éloge’ of Euler asserted that the princess had been the first
to recommend the instruction4. Whoever suggested to Euler the instructional
letters, they helped prepare Frederike Charlotte to rule as the Princess Abbess of
Imperial Herford Abbey and for what developed into her sister’s salon. This might
also be the reason for the greater range of subjects. Euler at 53 was already

3
Nicolas de Condorcet 1786 Éloge de Léonard Euler (1783) (Eulogy of Leonhard Euler) History of the Royal
Academy of Sciences (Paris) pp 37–68.
4
Ibid.

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 Leonhard Euler’s Letters to a German Princess

celebrated for his scientific research and teaching. That he found time for the
instruction with all of his other work, including essentially being the acting
president of the Berlin Academy, testifies to his commitment to teaching. There
might be an additional reason for his being asked: his deep religious devotion, as
reflected in the letters on religion. He was a Calvinist and regular member of the
Huguenot Französiche Friedrichstadtkirche (French Reformed Church) in Berlin.
He was known to read and discuss passages from the Bible each evening to his
whole household, family and servants, often followed by a sermon, mainly as his
pastor father had done in teaching youngsters.
Euler’s first letter states that the hope of having the honor to instruct ‘your
highness […] in person’ with ‘my lessons in geometry (applied mathematics)’ was
growing increasingly distant. The notion that he began with a few physics lessons in
Berlin in 1759 or even early 1760 at Frederick Henry’s recently acquired residence
seems unlikely. Euler had already taught a few sons of the nobility with Frederick’s
approval, and Russian students who resided at his home. He also had a Tafelrunde
(Roundtable), a weekly luncheon meeting at his home with about a dozen colleagues
and students. Roundtables were a common practice beginning with the king at his
palace Sanssouci. But the time of instruction in person in 1759 or early 1760 runs
counter to the locations on both sides, unless Frederick Henry delayed his departure
to Magdeburg.
This was a time of turmoil during the Seven Years’ War with brief, separate
occupations of Berlin by Russian and Austrian troops in October of 1760.
Assuming that the princesses did not leave Berlin until 1760, the personal
instruction was possible. During the Seven Years War from 1756 to 1763 the
Prussian monarch Frederick II, the Great had moved the royal Prussian court
from Potsdam and Berlin 150 kilometers south-west to Magdeburg. Many nobles
also left the city. The queen followed the king in 1759. This movement forced Euler
to give his personal instruction by correspondence. He had remained in Berlin with
his younger children, with his mother and a tutor at his country estate in
Charlottenburg, nearby west of Berlin. He would often take walks to visit with
them. In 1760 Cossack troops looted his Charlottenburg estate. In the letters Euler
wrote with engaging insight and a clarity of explanation about the natural world,
two characteristics of all of his published writings. For the Letters, he had to use
terms that an educated teenager could understand. Both princesses supported the
234 letter course to its conclusion.
After writing what became the first section on general science, Euler posed
difficult letters in section two on philosophy and religion with issues relating to the
origin of evil, the soul, prayer, liberty, and the search for true happiness. A major
change in the subjects of the letters away from those of section two came in May
1761, as part of a personal meeting between Euler and the princesses along with their
father. In May Euler visited them in Magdeburg for a few weeks. It was during a trip
in which he took his son Karl Johann to study medicine at the University of Halle.
The drive in the wagon on that journey must have been fascinating, for Karl was
talkative, while Euler was restrained but lively in conversations. Even with Prussia at
war and enemy troops on its soil, Euler was not fearful about travel. After the close

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 Leonhard Euler’s Letters to a German Princess

of section two, on modes of syllogisms and truth in philosophy, Euler started section
three with an examination of the nature of matter. In Magdeburg he gave a few
lessons, and Princess Frederike Charlotte informed him that she could no longer
completely understand his letters.
Wolff’s monads, Euler’s main subject for the nine letters in May, was
controversial in Prussia. During 1747, they had been heatedly and widely debated
all across Berlin and Prussia, and were the subject for the annual prize of the
reorganized Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences and Belles Lettres in Berlin that
year. The German learned journals and Wolffian philosophers at universities,
particularly Halle and Leipzig, had criticized Euler and the academy for their
supposed partiality and injustice in granting the prize at a meeting with noble
dignitaries for a paper against monads. Euler had struck first in this debate about
them by writing an anonymous brochure, Gedancken von den Elementen der
Cörper, in welchen das Lehr-Gebäude von den einfachen Dingen und Monaden
geprüft, und das wahre Wesen der Cörper endteckt wird (Thoughts on the elements
of bodies, in which the doctrine of simple things and monads is examined and the
true essence of bodies is discovered, 1746 (E81)), which was known to be his. He
now wrote that the new Royal Prussian Academy President, Pierre-Louis Moreau
de Maupertuis (1698–1759), had named a committee headed by Euler himself to
select the best paper. One troubling issue in 1761 was the concept of divisibility
ad infinitum. Euler found to be wrong the Wolffian rejection of divisibility
ad infinitum in bodies, or extension, and asked how many monads are needed to
start an extension5. He asserted that an infinity of new classes with smaller
magnitudes could be found. He saw the monadic doctrine of Wolff ‘an extrava-
gance into which the spirit of philosophizing may run6’. After May Euler promised
to limit himself to questions in the physical sciences, and he did. His search for
generalization in the sciences, under way in the first two sections of letters, clearly
developed in section three.
The contacts between Euler and Frederick Henry continued after Euler returned
to St. Petersburg in 1766. In 1767 Euler wrote the margrave from Russia about the
publication soon of the first two volumes of the Letters to a German Princess in
St. Petersburg, which occurred in 1768. Euler sent both volumes by mail to the
margrave in Berlin. The last letter from Euler came in 1773. The third volume of the
Letters had appeared in 1772. He promised to send six copies to Berlin. The last
contact came in 1780 when the margrave visited the Imperial Court in St. Petersburg
on a secret diplomatic mission about the first partition of Poland among Imperial
Russia, Prussia, and Imperial Austria. They had not seen each other since Euler’s
departure from Berlin in 1766. Euler was ill and in bed. Frederick Henry sat next to
him and held his hand for several hours. Frederick Henry could not converse about
mathematics. The two spoke instead about the history and literature of ancient
Rome and Greece. Most of all they spoke of Wolff’s philosophy. Euler remained a
major critic of Wolff’s rational philosophy in physics. His opposition to Wolff’s

5
Letters, II, 10.
6
Letters, II, 15.

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 Leonhard Euler’s Letters to a German Princess

philosophy continued to center on the monadic doctrine. Wolff’s philosophy went

against Newtonian science, which Euler defended, except for its optics. Euler, who
found a number of errors in Wolff’s scientific writings, still apparently highly
regarded him as a talented teacher.
Euler and Frederick Henry would never see each other again. After Euler died in
1783, the margrave of Brandenburg-Schwedt sent Princess Ekaterina Dashkova
(1743–1810), the director of the Petersburg Academy (1786–1796), his condolences.
With the help of the academy’s secretary, Johann Albrecht Euler, Leonhard Euler’s
eldest son, she answered him.
For the Letters to a German Princess Euler employed French, the second
language of Europe. French was adopted at continental royal courts by the nobility
and at the Berlin Academy. It also was the language of the Paris Academy, the
leading center of scientific research in Europe, and the French Republic of Letters.
Latin, the language of learning, would have had a limited audience. Euler’s goal was
to reach a wider readership with sound information about fundamentals of the
physical sciences that addresses its scope, somewhat as Galileo had reached more
readers outside Latin-reading scholars by publishing in the Italian vernacular his
Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo (The Dialogue Concerning the Two
Chief World Systems, 1632), comparing the Copernican heliocentric system with the
traditional Ptolemaic-Apollonian geocentric model. Hypothetically it favored the
Copernican model and ignored the construct of Tycho Brahe, which was influential
at the time.
In the years after 1762, in Berlin, Euler had edited the Letters to a German
Princess, hoping to publish them in their entirety. His and Frederick Henry’s
troubles with Frederick II probably accounted for their not having yet been printed.
Frederick II wanted Schwedt, a territory north-east of Berlin held by Frederick
Henry. He was also upset with the financial records of the Berlin Academy, which
Euler oversaw. Upon his return to Russia in 1766, Euler was nearly blind and his
Letters might have been lost in the trunks containing his unpublished writings.
Occupied with the publication of multivolume books on lunar theory, lenses and
optics, and integral calculus, Euler did not at first recover the individual Letters.
Jacob Stählin (1709–85), the conference secretary of the Petersburg Imperial
Academy, discovered them in a search of the trunks filled with the unpublished
writings by Euler then took them directly to Count Vladimir Orlov, the director of
the Petersburg Academy from 1766 to 1774, to arrange for their publication. The
letters, supported by Catherine II, were to be published in either two or three
volumes. In 1768 the Petersburg Academy published the first two volumes of the
Letters to a German Princess in French. The third and final volume appeared in St.
Petersburg in 1772 in Russian and in Frankfurt in 1774 in German.
Euler wrote the Letters to a German Princess in Berlin at the summit of his career.
According to Condorcet, it was the first time a person of Euler’s stature had written
such a work. Its publication was part of the revolution that the printing press was
making possible in the transmission of knowledge. Major figures in the scientific
community usually did not issue popularizations, and these were often criticized as
being inferior for a lack of command of materials. If they did write one, that effort

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 Leonhard Euler’s Letters to a German Princess

usually happened at the start of their career or late in it. But Euler’s letters were sent
from 1760 to 1762 and edited in the following few years, when he was active in
publication of numerous articles and completing many manuscripts for forthcoming
books: his landmark work. the 775-page Theoria Motuum Lunae (On the theory of
lunar motion in analytical form, 1772), his Dioptricae (three volumes on the
properties of lenses, the general theory of optics, and optical instruments, 1769–71)
and Institutionum Calculi Integralis (three volumes on the foundation of integral
calculus and with the analytical form of the calculus of variations, 1768–70, to be
printed in St. Petersburg).
The Letters to a German Princess is a work distinguished by its high quality and
clarity of insights presented in the simpler, popular style of his writing. It thereby
continued and improved upon the level for popularization of the sciences set by
Bernard Fontenelle (1657–1757) in his Entretiens sur la Pluralité des Mondes
(Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds, 1686). The Mondes, as it was known,
gives evening discussions between an astronomer and a marquise. The book
supported the Copernican heliocentric astronomy as most likely true, with the
second and third nightly presentations describing the findings of Galileo and Kepler,
and its fourth and fifth explaining, along with Cartesian physics, the relatively new
Cartesian vortex cosmology, claiming whirlpools of an elastic ether existed in the
heavens. Euler also considered adding to his writing important new topics, such as
intelligent life on the Moon and the planets. As the full title shows, the Letters to a
German Princess were intended for the instruction of young women in the sciences. It
offered an enlarged plan for their education. Besides sewing, music, or art, they
could also possibly learn about the phases of the Moon, the tides, or the effects of
electricity. It is amazing that Euler was able to set aside time on Saturdays and
Tuesdays to compose one or sometimes more of his letters.
Euler knew directly that three other writers of his time addressed possible women
readers in the sciences. In popularity the Letters to a German Princess quickly
surpassed even Fontenelle. The Mondes had reached a large readership by making
the sciences more interesting and understandable. In 1726/7 the Russian noble
philosophe Antiokh Kantemir (1708–44), who had studied at the Academic
University in St. Petersburg, translated it into Russian, but could not get it published
there. From 1728 to his departure from Russia in 1733 Daniel Bernoulli led the
support for its publication. During the 1730s Euler, too, advocated its publication,
but until 1740 church censors, holding to their opposition to the heliocentric theory,
suppressed it. Euler did not sharply criticize the censors, but compared the dispute to
debates in the sciences and mathematics. In response to Fontenelle, Count Francesco
Algarotti (1712–64) wrote Newtonianismo per la dame (Newtonianism for the Lady,
1734). Algarotti’s book depicted the rise of Newtonian science against Fontenelle’s
Cartesian views. His work, mostly on optics, was meant more for amusement
than for instruction. At Kantemir’s urging, Algarotti in 1739 visited Czarina Anne
(1693–1740) in St. Petersburg to present her a copy of his book. During the visit Euler
first met Algarotti. Possibly they saw each other later in Berlin.
In religion Euler stood in contrast to leading Enlightenment scholars regarding
the continuing struggle between faith in written revelation in the Scriptures and

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 Leonhard Euler’s Letters to a German Princess

reason. This explains his not being called a philosophe even with his extraordinary
and transforming achievements. Euler wrote on religion on only two occasions. The
first was his brochure ‘Gedancken von den Elementen der Cörper …’ (Thoughts on
the Elements of Bodies …, 1746, E81) in part against Wolffians and freethinkers,
who questioned the literal truth of the Bible. He labeled them rabble, troublemakers.
His second effort was the section on philosophy and religion in the Letters to a
German Princess. Both were considered poor by French philosophes and Wolffian
philosophers at German universities.
A devout Calvinist, Euler defended core religious and spiritual positions. In the
debate over the literal interpretation of Scriptures, Euler considered them trust-
worthy. Galileo had said that two books, the Scriptures and the Book of Nature,
were being investigated. Euler compared religion to science, in that it also has
contradictions and paradoxes. Still, both were accepted. Euler replied to philoso-
phers’ objections to the usefulness of prayer. He maintained that prayers were not
determined by God in a pre-established harmony. He rejected Leibniz’s principle for
religious not scientific reasons. Euler found it mechanist in outcome. He believed
that the Universe is not a machine (letter 97). The pre-established harmony was
‘destructive of human liberty’ (letters 91, 93, and 94). Prayers could be free
depending on the circumstances surrounding them. Not even God could block their
liberty. Further, he thought the soul is the principal organ in the body and resides in
the brain; the union between the mind and body that occurs in humans and animals
is wonderful but remains a mystery. Euler discussed life, the knowledge and
properties of bodies established by experiments( letters 90, 92 and 93); the liberty
of intelligent beings (85 and 91), the pursuit amid evils of true happiness (‘a certain
disposition’, that is, virtue, to attain a perfect union with the Supreme Being, letters
103 and 104). These ideas would reappear in a little over a decade in the new United
States ‘Declaration of Independence’, 1776.
The Letters to a German Princess contains information concerning Euler’s
mature position in major disputes in the history of science. They relate Euler’s
views in the competition between Cartesians and Newtonians centering at the Paris
Academy on such matters as the shape of Earth (E48), the tides (E62–7), and the
extent of the application of Newton’s gravity (E45–61 and E68). In the Principia
mathematica, Newton had indicated the need for further such studies. Euler
differed with Newton on the nature of light and the ultimate nature of matter.
Newton held light to be corpuscular, while for Euler it was a pulse, a wave (E17–20).
That it could be both a particle and a wave was not yet accepted. Newton depicted
the ultimate matter as hard, impenetrable, passive, and indivisible atoms. Euler
reviewed the conservation of vis viva polemic and disagreed with Newton on
indivisibility. He posited point atoms and held inertia and impenetrability to be
basic characteristics of them.
Euler was at the center of the intense dispute between Pierre-Louis Moreau de
Maupertuis (1698–1759), the president of the Berlin Academy, and Johann Samuel
König (1712–57). Maupertuis maintained that he had first formulated and
published the famous principle of least action and that it completed Newton’s
laws. During a visit to Maupertuis and the Berlin Academy in October 1749,

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 Leonhard Euler’s Letters to a German Princess

König set off a priority dispute by claiming that he had an alleged fragment of a
letter from Leibniz to Jakob Hermann in Basel that had a statement of the
principle in 1707. (Actually Euler had first published the principle in his Methodus
inveniendi lineas curvas maximi minimive proprietate gaudentes (Method of finding
curves that show some property of maximum or minimum, numbered, E65), but
credited Maupertuis with priority.) In the dispute Wolffians at the academy
supported the claim for Leibniz against Maupertuis and questioned the generality
of the principle. After an investigation, which included Frederick II requesting
searches in Basel and collections of Leibniz’s papers that did not produce the letter,
members present at a meeting of the Berlin Academy in 1751 voted unanimously
for Maupertuis. Those members opposed to Maupertuis did not attend. Euler read
the judgment of the academy and developed the differential equations that apply to
the principle of least action, which Maupertuis could not do.
Making translations of the letters from the French original has posed challenges.
Translators must know the subjects of the original and its author, which requires an
understanding of different grammars, in part the conjugation of verbs, root mean-
ings and other words in their vocabulary, possible colloquial phrases, the points of
view of their author, and their social and cultural contexts. Difficulties with these
and alterations to the original text made over time can hinder and frustrate
translations. While translations of the Letters to a German Princess convey Euler’s
thought in general, they were not without some faults. Euler was uneasy with his
command of French learned in Berlin, and when he returned to St. Petersburg
worked to improve the translating service at its Imperial Academy of Sciences. The
initial publication of its three volumes (volumes one and two in 1768, and volume
three in 1772) was made during his lifetime. The volumes were beautifully done.
Euler’s sight was worsening. He was growing nearly blind, so each morning his son
Johann Albrecht read him the mail, papers, and likely parts of his coming
publications. Between 1768 and 1774 the astronomer and student of Euler Stepan
Rumovskij (1734–1812) made the translation from French to Russian. It was the
first of five Russian editions by 1808. Those wishing to know Euler’s exact views
should consult the original Petersburg edition and, for example, not Condorcet’s
French edition that has omissions and changes.
Criticisms of the language and religious portions, although not the scientific
matter, of Euler’s French original came in 1787 from the French philosopher of the
Enlightenment, historian, mathematician, and educational reformer Marie Jean
Antoine Nicolas Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet (1743–94), known as Nicolas de
Condorcet7, the secretary of the Paris Academy and since 1776 a member ‘Honoris
Causa’ of the Petersburg Academy. Assisted by the French mathematician Sylvestre
François Lacroix (1765–1843), Condorcet made an important edition in French with
the printing of volume 1 in 1787, volume 2 in 1788, and volume 3 in 1789. Condorcet
wrote the preface, added notes, and initially omitted letters with ‘any moral,
spiritual, or religious views’; the second French edition in 1795 restored these letters

7
Condorcet was a member of the Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris and the French Academy. In
mathematics he worked on probability.

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 Leonhard Euler’s Letters to a German Princess

on religion, which Condorcet viewed as ‘anathema’ to the teaching of science and

reason. These showed that Euler was a devout reform Christian, in his case a devout
Calvinist after he left Basel. Condorcet used the three volumes of the St. Petersburg
edition in French by Euler. Condorcet’s edition, in its more elegant Parisian French,
was the first to make the Letters to a German Princess famous across Europe. These
translations were published during difficult times in France amid years of crisis and
the beginning of the great French Revolution. As the translators worked, these were
difficult and chaotic times in Paris. Perhaps seeking to put the Letters to a German
Princess into the better Parisian French, Condorcet made several editorial changes
in language, even though Euler had written the letters in French, added notes, and at
first left out the frequent courtly references to ‘Your Highness’, which he found
‘tiresome’.
Condorcet’s edition was the one that most translators, including Hunter,
employed, and the second French edition restored the omitted letters. Those missing
letters had been published in an edition of the first volume of the Letters to a German
Princess in 1770 in Leipzig and Mitau (Jelgava, Latvia), then a German town and
the capital of Courland (figure 2.4). Hunter noted that he, unlike Condorcet, had
included them.
The chief criticism of later translations was that they altered the original by
adding scientific information not known in Euler’s time. He still accepted that in the
heavens the stars were fixed and only comets moved, but he did not give the list of
the planets that usually appears in the translations. They have Earth together with
six major and four minor other planets. But the asteroids Ceres, Palas, Juno, and
Vesta were not to be discovered for about a half century after Euler’s death, and at
home with his soon to be successor at the Petersburg Academy, Anders Johan Lexell
(1740–84), he discussed computations for the orbit of Herschel’s recent finding of
Georgium Sidus (Uranus) on the last day of his life. Other criticisms of editions and
translations of the Letters to a German Princess were that they deleted parts for
political purposes or excised words from a time past.
The Scottish minister Henry Hunter (1741–1802) made the English translation
given here. It was the first and arguably the only rendering in English. Hunter had
received his Doctor of Divinity degree in 1771 from the University of Edinburgh.
From 1771 he preached at the London Wall church and was the chaplain to the
Scots Corporation in London. Skilled in languages, he began his translations with
the Swiss writer Johann Kaspar Lavater’s Essays on Physiognomy (1775–8). When it
was well received, Hunter looked for another work to translate. He considered an
essay in German by Euler on electricity. But with the popularity of Euler’s Letters to
a German Princess established, Hunter decided to translate it entirely, and did so in
two volumes, published in 1795, from Condorcet’s French edition. Hunter added the
letters on religion that Condorcet had not. A minister, he believed that Condorcet
had ‘thought it proper to suppress’ them. But Hunter agreed that the frequent
reference to ‘Your Highness’ was ‘an unnecessary waste of time’. He deleted it after
the first reference. His chief goal was to follow the lead of Euler in educating young
women, in his case British.

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 Leonhard Euler’s Letters to a German Princess

Figure 2.4. Frontispiece of Lettres à une Princesse d’Allemagne sur divers sujets de Physique & de Philosophie
(1770).
Source: https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1406/1406.7417.pdf.

In 1823 the Scottish physicist David Brewster (1781–1868), Fellow of the Royal
Society, known for his research in physical optics, added a preface, a life of Euler,
together with notes to Hunter’s English translation of the Letters to a German
Princess, that he called ‘the most popular work that ever was written’ in the sciences.
In addition, Euler’s theory ‘that light consists of undulations of an ethereal
medium8’ was gaining particular interest at the time.

8
Leonhard Euler 1840 Letters of Euler on Different Subjects in Natural Philosophy (New York: Harper and
Brothers). David Brewster added the preface, notes, and a life of Euler; preface, p 12.

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 IOP Concise Physics

Leonhard Euler’s Letters to a German Princess

A milestone in the history of physics textbooks and more
Ronald S Calinger, Ekaterina (Katya) Denisova and Elena N Polyakhova

Chapter 3
Euler: life, research, and teaching

By 1760 Leonhard Euler was the foremost mathematician, theoretical physicist, and
theoretical astronomer in Europe and imperial Russia. He was the director of the
mathematics department of the Berlin Academy, a member of the Petersburg
Academy (figure 3.1) and a foreign member of the Paris Academy, as well as
Fellow of the Royal Society of London. His reputation as a celebrity mathematician
reached across Europe from St. Petersburg to London and extended over the
Atlantic to the English colonies in North America. He attained a degree of celebrity
that stemmed from his genius in both theory and application, otherwise achieved in
the sciences solely by Galileo Galilei, Isaac Newton, and Albert Einstein. In Euler’s
time, the only person better known was Voltaire.
Driven by a passion for mathematics and natural science, a near boundless
energy, a phenomenal memory, a commitment to building a strong and independent
base for the sciences beyond the older patronage, and a defense of reformed
Christianity, Euler made extensive and profound contributions across almost the
entire range of pure and applied mathematics during the Enlightenment era. The
core of his research was in differential calculus and celestial mechanics, which he
made the sciences par excellence of the eighteenth century. Euler was the principal
founder of two major branches of calculus, the calculus of variations and that of
differential equations, where he made hundreds of bold discoveries. Among his most
famous formulas are V − E + F = 2 for the vertices, edges, and faces of a complex
polyhedron, and the now so-called Euler identity, eiπ + 1 = 0, that connects the five
most important mathematical constants and the three fundamental transcendental
numbers (e, i, and π), and has important applications in the sciences. Though it has
been called ‘beautiful’ and ‘the most remarkable formula in mathematics’, Euler
never wrote it as given here. In pure mathematics he created in geometry Euler
angles, the Euler triangle, and the Euler circle; in analysis the Euler number, the
Euler method for approximating differential equations, and the Euler–Mascheroni
transcendental constant, gamma = 0.577 215 66… ; in number theory the Euler

doi:10.1088/2053-2571/aae6d2ch3 3-1 ª Morgan & Claypool Publishers 2019

 Leonhard Euler’s Letters to a German Princess

Figure 3.1. At the Kunstkamera, the location of the early Petersburg Academy.
Source: https://themathematicaltourist.wordpress.com/category/russia/page/2/#jp-carousel-490.

indicator, Euler’s pentagonal formula for partition; in topology the Euler–Poincaré

characteristic; for natural logarithms he made the base e = 2.718 281 8… standard.
He also pioneered the differential geometry of surfaces. Through his many writings
he made standard more notation by adopting such symbols as Σ for summation, π
for pi, the circumference of a circle divided by its diameter, in trigonometry the
abbreviations sin, cos, and sec for sine, cosine, and secant, and for triangles ABC
opposite angles of the vertices by abc; and he increased the number of symbols by
providing new ones, such as replacing Johann Bernoulli’s f of x with the symbols f(x)
for a function of x, and providing i for the square root of −1 used in imaginary
numbers and the exponential number e as the base of natural logarithms—all of
these taking decades to gain acceptance. He was deeply drawn to number theory for
its connections with other fields, its aesthetics, the appeal of its abstraction, and
Fermat’s conjectures, and he made significant contributions to it. These accomplish-
ments in pure mathematics alone place Euler in the company of Archimedes, Isaac
Newton, and Carl Friedrich Gauss as one of the four greatest mathematicians in
history. Today there are dozens of formulas, equations, theorems, and objects in all
branches of mathematics that carry the name of Euler.
Working in cooperation with, as well as occasional rivalry, Jean d’Alembert, Alexis
Clairaut, Daniel Bernoulli, Tobias Mayer, and Colin Maclaurin, and later with
Joseph-Louis Lagrange, Euler was the principal figure in transforming the older exact
sciences of mechanics, astronomy, and optics into the modern mathematical sciences
based on differential calculus. Euler start with this in print with the Mechanica (1736).
In mechanics Euler, not Newton, formulated most of the fundamental differential

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 Leonhard Euler’s Letters to a German Princess

equations before William Rowan Hamilton. Fluid mechanics has Euler equations.
Euler was the creator of continuum mechanics and the mechanics of elasticity. He also
advanced the study of ballistics, cartography, dioptrics, hydraulics, hydrodynamics,
ship theory, and music theory. His massive and fearless computations, his extraordi-
nary applications of analysis and analogies, his near-unerring instinct, and the clarity
of his writing made him more than any other geometer since Claudius Ptolemy, in
second-century Alexandria, dominant in all branches of what became the mathemat-
ical sciences.
Euler won the influential annual prizes of the Paris Academy an unmatched
dozen times and led in making the Petersburg and Berlin Academies into prominent
European research centers. He was also the most prolific mathematician and
mathematical scientist in history. All but twenty of Euler’s 868 articles and books
are listed chronologically in the inventory made by Swedish mathematician Gustaf
Eneström and usually referred to as the Eneström Index, assembled from 1910 to
1913. If correspondence is removed, the total number is about 850. Of these, 756
were published in Euler’s lifetime. He predicted that it would take twenty years to
publish all the work he was leaving behind; it actually took nearly fifty, with the last
publication in 1830. Euler’s writings are listed here as a capital E followed by its
number in the order of its appearance, thus E1 is his first publication and E36 the
thirty-sixth1. His Opera Omnia (Collected Works) consists of four series. Of his
research articles and books, 810 fill the first three series with 74 volumes of 300–600
pages each with little repetition. Two volumes of series II, 26 and 27, on perturbation
theory in astronomy are still missing. The last series, IVA, of his correspondence and
twelve notebooks, which total some 4000 pages, is nearing completion with the
Repertorium IVA 1 and six more volumes in eight parts, IVA 2–7, in print. Another
volume is scheduled for 2020. The rest of the Euler correspondence and remaining
parts of his manuscript heritage will be on the online platform Bernoulli–Euler
Online (BEOL). Until recently, no detailed biography of Euler existed. Emil
Fellmann, Rüdiger Thiele, and Philippe Henry had completed shorter biographies2.
The first comprehensive biography was written by Ronald Calinger and published in
2016.

3.1 The Swiss years, 1707–27

Euler was born on 15 April 1707 (n.s.) in Basel in the Swiss Confederation. He was
the eldest child of the Basler Evangelical Reformed minister Paul III Euler and his
wife Margaretha (née Brucker). The next year Paul III was named pastor of Riehen,
a village located about 5.4 km northeast of Basel, near the river Wiese, a tributary of
the Rhine. In 1708 the family moved to Riehen. The father remained there until his
death in March 1745. The village had a temperate, roughly sub-Mediterranean
climate, with rich vegetation. It was known for the white blossoms of its cherry trees,

1
Original publications can be found at http://eulerarchive.maa.org/ using the same reference numbers.
2
For full title information, see the selected bibliography.

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 Leonhard Euler’s Letters to a German Princess

its colorful plum trees, and the gold and red leaves on a variety of grapes in the
vineyards. Euler grew up with two younger sisters.
Euler’s father, who had studied under Jakob Bernoulli, began his son’s education
in mathematics not with geometry but with the German cossist (algebraist) Michael
Stifel’s enlarged second edition (1553) of Christoph Rudolff’s Coss (1525), the first
comprehensive text on algebra in German. Coss roughly means ‘something
unknown’. It still solved equations, most of the second degree, largely in verbal
form but had introduced some new notation. At Euler’s age, Stifel’s book was
extremely difficult.
Leonhard did not spend much of his youth in Riehen. At about the age of eight,
he was sent to live with his maternal grandmother in Basel. He now observed boats—
mainly ferry boats, freighters, and canoes—at the nearby dock and on the Rhine.
Euler was moved to Basel to attend its Gymnasium, a Latin school that was in a
poor state and by a vote of the citizens of Basel did not teach mathematics. Like
most parents, his hired a tutor, a minister, Johann Burckhardt, who sided with
Johann I Bernoulli in fights over the calculus with British geometers and natural
philosophers. Euler’s father, his maternal grandfather, and Burckhardt were all
ministers, so religion was often in his life. Likely Burkhardt and Euler discussed
Copernicus, Descartes, and Newton. Euler was a talented child whose biographers
agree was open, cheerful, and sociable.
In October 1720 Leonhard registered at the University of Basel in the philosoph-
ical faculty. He was thirteen. To enter a university at that age was not unusual for
the time. Through hard work, his photographic memory and his brilliant mind,
Euler excelled in his studies. He displayed his photographic memory by reciting by
heart long passages from the ninety-five hundred verses of Virgil’s Aeneid. It took
two years to receive his prima laurea, roughly his bachelor’s degree. He was fifteen.
His undergraduate thesis was on moderation, De temperantia. He also gave a speech
in Latin titled ‘Declamatio: De arithmetica et geometria’ (Rhetoric: On arithmetic
and geometry), which commended the superiority of geometry. The philosophical
faculty imparted a general education and the preparatory part of the university that
was like secondary schools today.
In the summer of 1723 Euler passed the examination for a master’s degree for a
paper and lecture in Latin comparing the natural philosophies of Descartes and
Newton. About this time as his son’s interest turned more to mathematics and
natural philosophy, Euler’s father obliged him in October to register for theology to
prepare to become a rural pastor. Probably with the assistance of his friend Johann
II Bernoulli, Euler was able to negotiate a Saturday private tutorial with the difficult
Johann I Bernoulli to read major and classical works in the sciences by Copernicus,
Kepler, Rohault, Newton, and others and remove obstacles or difficulties in solving
their mathematical problems. Euler found the work exhilarating. Nearly untiring, he
ended with few obstacles. Perhaps Johann I Bernoulli, who now saw Euler’s
extraordinary genius, traveled to Riehen in 1725 with him on a visit to his father
to ask that Leonhard switch to mathematics. The father agreed.
Few jobs existed for mathematicians or places to publish their articles and books.
Almost no scientific journals, except for Acta Eruditorum, existed in central Europe.

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 Leonhard Euler’s Letters to a German Princess

In 1725 Bernoulli recommended Euler for a physics professorship at the University

of Basel, but hiring was done by lottery, and the young Euler was not selected. In the
competition for the position, he wrote a paper titled ‘Dissertatio Physica de Sono’,
which showed him to be an original thinker able to synthesize logically consistent
elements from divergent scientific traditions to construct a general theory. ‘De Sono’
was to become a classic. Around 1725 Euler had begun to outline in notebooks an
ambitious research program for himself. The first, or Basel notebook, includes a
proposal to write a substantial treatise on mechanics and gave three sections for a
new mathematical theory of music composition.
When his friend Daniel Bernoulli left in 1725 to be one of the first members of the
new Petersburg Academy, Euler asked to be recommended for the first open position
there. One opened in 1725 in medicine and Daniel Bernoulli’s recommendation was
accepted. Euler began to take medical courses for the post but left Basel in April
1727 after he failed to get the physics position at the university. That year Euler
came in third in a competition for the annual prize of the Paris Academy, the Prix de
Paris, on arranging the number and height of masts of ships and the shape of sails to
maximize speed. These were the top scientific awards of the century. Although Euler
had not yet seen ocean ships on the seas, he did what others had not: he formulated
and solved the required second-order differential equation. His paper reflected a
powerful intuition in physics3.

3.2 At the new Petersburg Academy: pathbreaking groundwork,

1727–41
Leaving Basel in April 1727, Euler went down the Rhine River to Frankfurt, crossed
over Hanover and Brandenburg to Lübeck, and sailed along the Baltic coast to St.
Petersburg. He arrived in May, a month and a half after the death of Isaac Newton.
Russian Empress Catherine I (1684–1727) died the week before Euler arrived. He
shared housing with other foreign natural philosophers, mathematicians, and
physicians. Princess Praskovia, Peter I’s sister-in-law, supplied furnished quarters
for all single, young, male members of the academy. The early academicians, except
for officials, were Swiss, German, or French. Euler worked with two other Baslers:
Jakob Hermann (1668–1733), particularly on their mistaken solution of the
brachistochrone problem, the curve of quickest descent by a weighted particle in a
vacuum, the cycloid, before 1730, and Daniel Bernoulli (1700–82) mainly on his
Hydrodynamica, published in 1738. The two had occasional arguments, which the
diffident Euler tried to avoid. Hermann, who was designated as Nestor, the wise
counselor, returned to Basel in 1731 and Bernoulli in 1733. On May 27, three days
after his arrival, at a reception of the academy’s president Lorenz von Blumentrost
(1692–1755), Euler met the academy’s secretary, Prussian jurist, and amateur
mathematician Christian Goldbach (1690–1764). Euler succeeded Bernoulli as the
prestigious professor of mathematics with a higher salary, though less than

3
Calinger R S 2016 Leonhard Euler: Mathematical Genius in the Enlightenment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press), ch 1.

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 Leonhard Euler’s Letters to a German Princess

Figure 3.2. Leonhard Euler by Vasilij Sokolov, 1737.

Source: http://eulerarchive.maa.org/portraits/portraits.html.

Bernoulli’s. In early January of 1734 (n.s.), he married Katherina Gsell (1707–73),

the daughter of the artist Georg Gsell. The father was a friend of the academy’s
despotic administrator Johann Schumacher; Leonhard and Katharina may have met
at parties at his house. The Eulers would go on to have 13 children, only five of
whom survived to adulthood. This survival rate was not unusual for the time. The
Eulers’ first child, Johann Albrecht, born in 1734, lived to 1800. Of the four children
who followed to 1740, three daughters died as infants4.
At the Petersburg Academy, Euler prepared the groundwork for his teaching and
his research (figure 3.2)5. All members of the academy were required to teach. Euler
taught mathematics, mechanics, physics, and astronomy at the Academic
Gymnasium, where he was a member of its examination board, and served at the
Academic University. In 1732 the French astronomer Joseph Nicolas Delisle (1688–
1768) taught astronomy. Teaching was often done in collaboration. Delisle taught
Euler how to make and record careful, professional astronomical observations. A
representative and equipment from the Physical Cabinet assisted with experiments.
Euler was known to devise experiments of his own for classes. At the Academic
University, Newtonian texts were employed in teaching physics, especially Willem ‘s
Gravesande’s two-volume Newtonian textbook Physices Elementa Mathematica…

4
Ibid., ch 3.
5
See Nevskaya N 2002 Saint-Petersburg Sources and Origins of Euler’s Physical and Philosophical Concepts
Leonard Euler: Letters to a German Princess, pp 555–609.

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 Leonhard Euler’s Letters to a German Princess

(Mathematical Elements of Natural Philosophy…), published in 1719–21 and 1723,

which consists almost entirely of descriptions of experiments. The Academy’s library
also had Pieter Musschenbroek’s textbook Elementa Physica (Elements of Physics,
1734), which likewise stressed experiments.
Euler’s research ranged across a wide spectrum in the sciences from number
theory and music theory to astronomy and ballistics. His articles for the academy’s
journal, Commentarii, deal chiefly with differential calculus and rational mechanics.
In number theory Christian Goldbach encouraged his research.
Earlier, others had shown that Fermat’s conjecture, that all 22 + 1 are prime,
n

holds for n = 1–4, but could not solve it for n = 5. Euler proved that it is wrong for
n = 5 or 232 + 1 = 4 294 967 297 = 641 × 6 700 417. His discovery that composite
Fermat numbers must have divisors of the form 2n + 1k + 1 made it easier to find the
divisor 641 for 26 when k = 10. Euler’s results appeared in volume 7 of the
Commentarii for 1734/35, which was not published until 1743. His summation
circulated at first by mail. His achievement was recognized, but his summation was
criticized for a lack of the rigor that he would not attain until 1742.
A more important accomplishment was Euler’s computation of the exact sum of
the Basel Problem, the infinite series of the reciprocals of square integers, 1 + 1/22 +
1/32 + … . Now it is called the zeta(2) series. It had been investigated for seventy-five
years. James Stirling, Nikolaus Bernoulli, Daniel Bernoulli and Euler himself had
computed ever closer approximations; but the exact solution had escaped even
Leibniz. Computing π at the time, Euler solved the Basel Problem in four different
ways. In December 1734 he found the exact sum to be π2/6. This was considered a
remarkable triumph for him, the greatest achievement in mathematics since
Gottfried Leibniz had computed π/4 = 1/1 − 1/3 + 1/5 − 1/7 + … .6 Euler used
Leibniz’s series in his computations. His results appeared in volume 7 of the
Commentarii, in ‘De summis serierum reciprocarum’, pp 73–86. Euler’s reputation
was rising.
In the mid-1730s the academy charged Euler with many tasks. He served on the
commission for weights and measures, helped test fire pumps, saws, and scales,
ordered the ink and paper for the academic printing press, submitted expert reviews
of candidates along with possible technology projects, inspired by Johannes Segner’s
water wheel worked on developing hydraulic machines, wrote articles for the local
paper, the St. Petersburg Vedomosti (Gazette) and in supplements to the journal
Primechaniya k Vedomostyam (Notes to the Gazette) to introduce the general public
to the new concepts and developments in the sciences, such as gravitational
attraction, and in technology. He presented open lectures at the academy on logic
and mathematics for the general public. When he became professor of mathematics
in 1733, he temporarily lessened his studies in physics and astronomy. But the main
assignment of Euler was to learn from Delisle and assist him in cartography and
geodesy. The chief state project of the early academy and the most heavily funded
was the Second Kamchatka (or Great Northern) Expedition, conducted from 1734

6
Sanders C E 2007 Euler’s solution of the Basel Problem—the longer story Euler at 300: An Appreciation ed R
E Bradley, L A D’Antonio (Washington D.C.: MAA) pp 105–19.

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 Leonhard Euler’s Letters to a German Princess

to 1743, led mostly by Vitus Bering (1681–1741). Its objective was to help prepare
the first accurate map of the Russian Empire. By late 1734 Euler had moved from
student of Delisle to colleague, independently making astronomical observations
needed to construct meridian tables. From 1735 he directed the geography depart-
ment, concentrating on mapmaking.
Even with these many assignments at the academy, Euler’s research proceeded
extremely rapidly. In mathematics he made pioneering advances in differential
equations, variational calculus, elementary and differential geometry, and integra-
tions of algebraic functions. He wrote on average five articles a year. With the
departures of Jakob Hermann and Daniel and Johann II Bernoulli, who belonged to
the so-called ‘dynasty’ of great Swiss mathematicians, no others, except for Christian
Goldbach, understood Euler’s research. Goldbach had returned from Moscow in
1732 and lived in a private house on Vasilievski Island, where Euler also lived from
1734 to 1740, a short walk from Goldbach. Besides seeing each other at the academy
conferences on Tuesday and Friday at 4:00 pm, they regularly visited each other’s
residence. In August 1735 the academy accepted Goldbach’s recommendation that
Euler circulate the papers for his research just for a mathematical conference to be
attended by Goldbach, the physicist Georg Wolfgang Krafft, the astronomer
Christian Nikolaus Winsheim, and occasionally Delisle. The Protokoly, the minutes
of the academy, show that nobody else at the academy now took part in
mathematical research. Volume 8 of the Commentarii for 1736, for example, has
12 papers on mathematics with one by Daniel Bernoulli and 11 by Euler, totalling
159 pages.
Two years after Euler exactly summed the Basel Problem, the principal reason for
his growing reputation across Europe appeared in his 980-page Mechanica sive
Motus Scientia analytice (Mechanics of the science of motion set forth analytically,
E15, E16), his first major book. In letters Johann Bernoulli had urged him to put
aside his work on music and complete the Mechanica, which was printed in two
volumes as a supplement to the Commentarii for 1736. Besides translating into
calculus much of Newton’s Principia, it broke decisively with the geometric format
of mechanics, as Euler became the first systematically to apply differential equations
to the science of motion. It was part of his ambitious program to compute the
motion of bodies that are elastic, fluid, flexible and rigid. In what would have been
exhausting for many, he took twenty years to complete it. Except for Benjamin
Robins, who faulted the Mechanica’s lack of an experimental basis and ‘blind
submission to computation’, most reviews praised it. Johann I Bernoulli hailed the
Mechanica as a landmark book in physics; Formey lauded its use of the analytic
method; Maupertuis called it an ‘excellent publication’; and its review in the Parisian
Mémoires de Trevoux in 1740 credited Euler with founding modern mechanics7,8.
From 1735 to 1740 Euler suffered from two serious health problems. Both
involved high fevers and bad headaches. In 1735 he had to calculate a confirmation

7
Calinger R S 1996 Leonhard Euler: the First St. Petersburg Years (1727–41) Historia Mathematica 23 121–66.
8
Calinger R S 2016 Leonhard Euler: Mathematical Genius in the Enlightenment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press), ch 4.

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 Leonhard Euler’s Letters to a German Princess

of the midday correction for determining the latitude of St. Petersburg. Euler
completed the task in a short time that before had been time consuming. Nicholas
Fuss’s eulogy of Euler contends that exhausting work here weakened Euler’s health
but did not yet affect his sight. He had invented a new procedure for the
computation that took less time. In the summer of 1738 he had a near-fatal fever.
An infection caused an abscess in the right eye. From the elderly Euler, Fuss
reported that there had been a complete loss of sight in the right eye. But portraits of
Euler suggest a gradual weakening of sight. Harsh weather and his extensive study of
maps, along later with a cataract, brought a deterioration of sight in his right eye
and led toward blindness.
During the years from 1736 to 1741, Euler wrote three books after the Mechanica.
The first, the Scientia Navalis (E110, E111), on shipbuilding and navigation, was
finished in 1738 but not published until 1749; the Tentamen novae theoriae musicae
ex ceretissimis harmoniae principiis dilucide exposita (An attempt at a new theory of
music composition exposed in full clarity according to the most certain principles of
harmony, E33), which sought to make music theory part of mathematics, was
published in 1739. This had little influence. A major criticism was that its mathemat-
ical computations were too advanced for musicians, and for mathematicians it was
too musical. Euler continued his study of acoustics and presented his figure for the
speed of sound. Newton had it as 1020 feet per second, and Euler was pleased to have
a higher speed than Newton’s, 1134 feet per second, that was to differ only slightly
from the actual value of 1125 feet per second (300 m/s). The speed of light, the fastest
known speed though not then exactly determined, also fascinated Euler. For the
Academic Gymnasium he prepared the two-part Einleitung zur Rechenkunst (An
Introduction to Arithmetic, E17), which was printed in 1738 and 1740. The explan-
ations and selection of topics in the Einleitung, including a long presentation on
currency conversions for his noble students, showed Euler to be a talented instructor.
This book may partly account for the absence of parts of its basic mathematics from
the Letters to a German Princess.
The diffusion, criticism, articulation and extension of Newtonian dynamics were
the main developments in eighteenth century science. At the Paris Academy the
dominant Cartesians had in the 1720s heatedly debated the rising young
Newtonians. The challenge was to demonstrate whether Descartes’ or Newton’s
science was superior. The first test was finding the true shape of the Earth. Cartesian
science, assuming whirlpools of ether in the heavens, predicted an elongated spindle,
while in Book 3, Proposition 19, of the Principia mathematica Newton computed
using his dynamics an oblate spheroid flattened at the poles. Is Earth elongated or
flattened? At the Paris Academy criticism grew of past geodetic measurements and
those of arcs of meridians in the north and south of France that were not far enough
apart to indicate Earth’s shape, and a rejuvenation of interest in mapmaking and the
desire of craftsmen to test new surveying equipment prompted the Paris Academy to
support an expedition to Lapland from 1736 to 1737 under Pierre-Louis Moreau de
Maupertuis (1698–1759) and to Peru (today Ecuador) under Charles-Marie de la
Condamine (1701–74). In seven articles, generally titled ‘Von der Gestalt der Erden’
(On the Shape of Earth, E46) in 1737 in the Vedomosti newspaper, Euler employed

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 Leonhard Euler’s Letters to a German Princess

telescopic observations, assumed a more diminished flattening at the poles than had
Newton, and noted results of the Lapland expedition to arrive at the more correct
orange shape. While Maupertuis from his expedition supported the Newtonian
shape and was hailed as a hero as ‘Sir Isaac Maupertuis’, bad weather and insects
affected his measurements, which were later shown to be poor. Euler awaited the
forthcoming pendulum studies and measures from Charles-Marie de la Condamine
(1701–74) and Pierre Bouguer (1698–1758) in Ecuador. La Condamine returned to
France with his results in 1744. The course of comets was another crucial item under
debate. There was contradictory data, so Euler asked for more observations with
improved telescopes and new differential equations. In the Newtonian–Cartesian
polemic, the return of Halley’s comet in 1759, the lunar theory of Clairaut and Euler
with second-order approximations that gave the motion of the Moon at apogee, and
the discovery of Uranus would all provide further definitive support for Newton.
Making pathbreaking advances in mathematics, Euler, in perfecting computa-
tional methods, discovered an interesting interpolation between the partial sums of
harmonic series and sequences of factorial numbers 1, 2, 6, 24, … that enabled him
to invent his constant, or what was later called the gamma function, that has
extensive connections in the sciences. He computed gamma to equal limn→∞ (1/1 +
1/2 + 1/3 + … + 1/n − ln n) = 0.577 215 664… . It is an important real constant and
stands alongside the transcendental numbers π and e. But to the present we do not
know whether gamma is rational, algebraic, or transcendental. G. H. Hardy had
promised to turn over his Savilian professorship at Oxford to anyone who could
prove that gamma is algebraic.
By developing three elementary classes of transcendental functions, exponential,
logarithmic, and trigonometric, Euler carried out a preparatory stage for his
Introductio in Analysin Infinitorum (E101, E102). Another of his significant compu-
tations is of the exponential function, ex, in which the exponent is the variable and
the derivative is the same as the original. He discovered that ex = limn→∞ of the
binomial expansion (1 + 1/n) and the series e = 1 +1/2! + 1/3! + … that gives
e = 2.718 281 828, which is accurate to nine decimal places. He also computed it as a
continued fraction. He had not yet established e as a natural base for logarithms, but
his massive computations gave logarithms a greater place in calculus. In trigonom-
etry Euler transformed the Ptolemaic chords and half chords into ratios of numbers.
This made the trigonometric lines into functions. In 1737 Euler discovered the
cardinal formula of analytical trigonometry, in modern notation eix = cos x + i sin x.
Besides work on his books, Euler presented in 1736 his anti-Wolffian views in the
sciences. While generally taciturn and not given to argument, he now publicly
criticized Wolff for the first time, finding Cosmologia Generalis to be filled with
errors and in Wolff’s latest edition of his Elementa Matheoseos Universae questioned
the theory of positive and negative infinity.
From 1736 to 1739 Euler continued to investigate number theory, especially
Fermat’s conjectures. Number theory was destined to fill four large volumes of his
Opera Omnia. In 1736 Euler discovered from a reading of Diophantus the ‘out-
standing’ little theorem that if p is a prime number and does not divide integer a,
then p divides ap−1 − 1, proving this by induction, but his article did not appear in

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 Leonhard Euler’s Letters to a German Princess

print until 1741 (E54). He did not realize that Fermat had earlier offered a proof. In
1738 he addressed Fermat’s Last, or Great, Theorem: for n greater than 2, there are
no positive integers x, y, and z, such that xn + yn would = zn. He proved it for n = 4.
He wrote to France urging further searches for Fermat’s writings. Euler’s study of
prime numbers and their distribution moved him toward the prime number theorem
(PNT), which was still a conjecture not clearly stated and without a proof. His major
discovery was that the asymptotic distribution of the primes among positive
numbers is related to natural logarithms. In modern notation, as later stated,
π(N) ~ N/ln N gives a good approximation of the number of primes less than or equal
to N. The gap between consecutive positive integers is roughly ln N. In 1736 he also
resolved the Königsberg Bridge Problem. Königsberg was in East Prussia on the
Pregel River. Euler showed it to be impossible to cross the five bridges without
repeating any of the journey. While Euler’s paper on this, ‘Solutio Problematis’,
contains no graphs, it is considered an early work in graph theory. That article did
not appear in the Commentarii until 1741. In 1737 he studied the nature of space and
time. He found both to be absolute. He agreed with Newton. They provided a frame
for his laws of mechanics.
In another forum, Euler’s reputation was quickly growing for eminence in the
sciences in Europe. He shared the Prix de Paris in 1738 on the nature and properties
of fire. Of the four Aristotelian elements, earth, air, fire, and water, fire was
considered the most volatile. Along with heat, electricity, and magnetism, it was a
crucial subject for research and figured in many studies of combustion, including the
phlogiston theory. This was before the discovery of oxygen. In 1738 two people
earned the accessit, Madame du Chȃtelet and Voltaire. Euler shared the prize in
1740 on tides and won the acccesit in 1739 and 1741. In even years the prize went to
a paper on a theoretical topic selected from astronomy, matter theory, optics, and
mechanics that had a handsome total award of 2500 livres. In odd years prizes were
for practical papers on shipbuilding, loading, and navigation with an award of 2000
livres. Euler won in both categories. Papers were submitted without the author’s
name and only a phrase connected with the author’s name in a sealed envelope.
In the summer of 1740, the Eulers seemed settled in St. Petersburg. Euler’s
sixteen-year-old brother Heinrich had arrived in 1735 and was studying art. In July
1740 a second son, Karl Johann, was born and survived. But already at the end of
May a new monarch, Frederick II, who ascended the Prussian throne at age twenty-
eight, was determined to bring Euler to Berlin and renovate the Royal Brandenburg
Society of Sciences. In St. Petersburg the departure of Delisle to join the second
Kamchatka Expedition worried Euler, for it left him to examine maps, a task that
harmed his vision. When Empress Anna died late in 1740, life became dangerous for
foreigners in St. Petersburg. When asked to cast a horoscope for the two-month-old
Ivan VI, Euler passed the honor to Georg Krafft, who was known as the court
astrologer.

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 Leonhard Euler’s Letters to a German Princess

3.3 At the renovated Berlin Academy: the summit of his career,

1741–66
At first Johann Schumacher blocked Euler’s release from the academy and Russia,
but relented. Euler first rejected what amounted to a salary cut from Frederick II but
then accepted an equal amount along with moving funds. After a rough three-week
passage on the Baltic, the Euler family arrived in July 1741 in Stettin, which
conferred honors on him, and left for Berlin, which they reached on 22 July after a
further three-day trip. The First Silesian War (1741–4) made funds from the
government scarce. The family had to live on credit the first year in Berlin.
Euler’s brother Heinrich soon left for Paris and Rome to study art. After that he
returned to Basel. At first the family moved near the Potsdam Bridge9. For New
Years Day 1742, the Queen Mother Sophie Dorothea (1687–1757), the daughter of
George I of Great Britain and who had known Leibniz, invited Euler to a party at
her salon for polite conversation with Calvinist and Lutheran clergy, nobles, and
French intellectuals. When he uttered only monosyllables, Sophie Dorothea asked
him why he did not join the discussions. He responded, ‘Madame … I have just
come from a country [Czarist Russia] where a man’s words can get him hanged10.’
This had in fact just happened to an academician in St. Petersburg. In 1742 Euler
purchased a house with a large garden on what would become 20 and 21
Behrenstrasse near to the planned science academy and new observatory. He
negotiated to be exempt from the quartering of troops. It took time to make repairs,
so the Eulers did not move into the house until September 1743. Euler lived there
until his departure from Berlin in 1766 (figure 3.3). The house, which still exists, is
today across from the Comic Opera. After several modifications, except for the
façade, it is now the residence of the Bavarian representative.
In Berlin, the family grew to seven. Joining their two sons were Katherine Helene,
born in 1741, Christoph in 1743, and Charlotte the next year. These three survived to
be adults. Euler enjoyed taking them to the zoo, especially to watch the bear cubs
play, and to puppet shows. He was known to laugh heartily at the puppets. In the
evening he read Scriptures to the children.
Euler remained active in teaching. To 1756 the Petersburg Academy sent several
Russian students, who lived in his house. He was their advisor and tutor. With the
approval of the king, he gave lessons in mathematics, astronomy, and physics to
sons of the nobility. Among these was Karl Eugen, Duke of Württemberg (1728–
93), the son of the Duchess of Württemberg, at their residence. Later Karl Eugen
was to build palaces in the Darmstadt region and became the patron of the German
dramatist and poet Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805). Euler also enjoyed playing the
clavier alone or in duets and invited composers to give recitals at his house. In Berlin
Euler was addicted to pipe tobacco. He preferred the ‘good tobacco’ from Virginia,
which he ordered from England.

9
Calinger R S 2016 Leonhard Euler: Mathematical Genius in the Enlightenment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press), ch 6, p 187.
10
Ibid., ch 6, p 187.

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 Leonhard Euler’s Letters to a German Princess

Figure 3.3. Leonard Euler by Jakob Handmann, 1756.

Source: http://eulerarchive.maa.org/portraits/portraits.html.

Neither the move to Berlin, teaching assignments, nor family and health concerns
slowed Euler, who continued making of a host of discoveries in his extensive
research and computations. In 1742 and 1743 he pursued his nearly exhaustive
calculations preparatory to his two-volume Introductio in Analysin Infinitorum (E101
and E102). These computations were done in stages. Euler made calculations until
blocked. When Euler or someone else discovered a way to resolve this methodical
blockage, he resumed the computations.
His calculation e = 2.718 281 845 904 was less precise than before, and he
approached what in modern symbols is eiπ = −1. Euler defined the natural logarithm
as the inverse of the exponential function and log(−1) = iπ to be an imaginary
number. In correspondence he and Jean d’Alembert debated whether it was
imaginary. The comet of February and March 1742 heightened Euler’s interest in
orbits and celestial mechanics in general. In 1742 Delisle wrote to him about
difficulties in determining the actual course of the comet that March. Euler’s text,
Theoria Motuum Planetarum et Cometarum (Theory of the motions of planets and
Comets, E166), published in 1744, gives the first differential equation for computing
each point in the orbits of Earth and Mars.
In 1742 the Royal Brandenburg Society welcomed the ‘famous’ Mr Euler. He
pressed for founding a rejuvenated and expanded Royal Prussian Academy of
Sciences. He addressed the issue of the source of income from the almanac
monopoly. By refining computation methods, Euler increased taxes collected from

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 Leonhard Euler’s Letters to a German Princess

10 000 to 13 000 Reichsthaler, but not his projected 16 000. The king disparaged this
abstract proposal that would bring debits rather than revenue.
Euler was not alone in being displeased with the slowness of progress in forming
the new science academy. Count Samuel von Schmettau founded the Nouvelle
Société Litteraire in 1743. The king did not want to lose leadership. On his birthday
in 1744 the old and new sociétés were joined to form the new Academy of Sciences
and Belles Lettres. Euler hoped to be president, but being frank, independent, and
bourgeois he was not acceptable to the king, who wanted a French intellectual,
noble, and witty in conversation with a European reputation. That person was
Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis. The king even selected someone besides Euler
to be director of the new academy’s mathematics department. Because of
Maupertuis’s illness and trips to Saint Malo, Euler was the acting president of the
Berlin Academy from 1753 and from 1759 after the death of Maupertuis.
The first of Euler’s landmark books in Berlin, the 320-page Methodus Inveniendi
Lineas Curvas Maximi Minimive Proprietate Gaudentes, sive Solution Problematis
Isoperimetrici Latissimo Sensu Accepti (The method of finding curves that show
some property of maximum or minimum, E65), published in 1744, represents an
early stage of the classical calculus of variations, determining minimal and maximal
lengths of curves, still treated mainly geometrically. It removed the ad hoc approach
to problems and called for general solutions. Euler gave his differential equation, the
first necessary condition for an extremum. At the end of chapter three, Euler gave
the most elegant solution of the brachistochrone problem to date. He added two
appendices. The first is a tract on the mathematical theory of elasticity. The second
introduces the principle of least action. Constantin Carathéodory called the
Methodus inveniendi ‘one of the most beautiful mathematical works ever written11.’
Apparently it was Euler, not Frederick II, who proposed the translation into
German of Benjamin Robins’ New Principles of Gunnery (1742). The result with
added annotations and appendices ran to 720 pages, almost five times longer than
the original. The Neue Grundsätze der Artillerie of 1745 (E77) began to transform
the collection of separate rules into the initial scientific treatise on gunnery. Euler
started to devise the first accurate differential equations for ballistic motion in the
atmosphere.
In 1746 Euler worked on the vibrating string problem, which had challenged
Bernoulli in the 1730s. Euler soon developed differential equations for strings with
fixed ends. This problem was later addressed by d’Alembert and Lagrange. In 1747
Euler presented in the article ‘De numeris amicabilis’ (E100) an algorithm for
generating amicable or friendly numbers. Each number is the sum of the proper
divisors of the other. In antiquity only two had been known, 220 and 284. Euler gave
27 new pairs12.
In 1748, roughly seventy-five years after its invention, calculus lacked a frame-
work with systematically arranged fundamental concepts. In a June 1744 letter to

11
Calinger R S 2016 Leonhard Euler: Mathematical Genius in the Enlightenment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press), ch 7, p 225.
12
Ibid., ch 8, p 270.

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 Leonhard Euler’s Letters to a German Princess

Goldbach, Euler said that he was writing a ‘prodromus in analysin infinitorum’, a

precalculus textbook. It defines and treats algebraic and transcendental functions
which are evolving. The Introductio in analysin infinitorum is the first text of his
trilogy on calculus. It has lengthy computations, with π in Book I to 127 decimal
places and e in Book II to 23 decimal places. It uses the symbol π, lx for ln x, f(x),
and abbreviations for trigonometric functions, sin., cos., tan., cot., sec., and cosec.
The second book in his calculus trilogy is Institutiones calculi differentialis
(Foundations of Differential Calculus; E212, 1755).
At the academy two major disputes arose. The subject for the first in the 1747
annual prize competition was Wolff’s monadic doctrine. Members were not
supposed to submit papers for this, but Euler broke the rule. He wrote in French
a pamphlet ‘Thoughts on the Elements of Bodies’ (E81) that had as an essential
property impenetrability from Newton and infinite divisibility from Euclid and
Leibniz, both of which Wolff rejected. Euler headed the prize committee that
selected a modest paper criticizing Wolff. This angered Wolffian professors at
universities, who charged him with suppressing the truth and a lack of impartiality.
Euler had won this competition, but lost another in 1748 in trying to stop the
election to the academy of the French physician, philosopher, hedonist, and
materialist Julien Offray de la Mettrie (1709–51) to the Belles-Lettres department
of the academy13.
In the late 1740s a break was emerging between d’Alembert and Euler. They had
argued over negative logarithms. D’Alembert believed they were real; Euler found
this ‘not fully correct’ and offered counterexamples. He rejected log(−x) = log x for
positive numbers. He believed that negative logarithms were imaginary. When
d’Alembert’s health posed a difficulty, they briefly stopped the dispute. But the main
point in their disagreement was fluid mechanics. In 1749 d’Alembert submitted an
awkward paper on that topic for the Berlin annual prize. Euler believed it did not
deserve the award. D’Alembert was informed of Euler’s review of this paper.
In 1749 the Paris Academy announced its annual prize on the motion of the
moon’s apogee, a three-body problem with first-order approximations of differential
equations to confirm the exactness of Newtonian celestial mechanics or to add a
small correction.
This was a central problem for determining geographical coordinates in map-
making and for navigational position at sea. Separately Clairaut and d’Alembert
found initially that Newton’s attraction alone could not account for the motion of
lunar apogee. Clairaut briefly added an inverse fourth power to calculations. Euler
was not satisfied with these results. They came at a time when the rivalry pitting
Euler against Clairaut and d’Alembert was growing. In a sharp reversal the next
year Clairaut found using Newton’s attraction complete agreement on lunar motion.
He worked with a second-order approximation but kept his computations secret. To
get these Euler urged the Petersburg Academy to put as the topic for its first annual
prize, whether lunar inequalities follow from Newton’s laws. Schumacher and the

13
Ibid., ch 9, p 297.

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academicians agreed. As a member of the prize committee, Euler would see

Clairaut’s calculations. Once he did so, he refined Clairaut’s equations14.
In 1746 Euler received a job offer from the Petersburg Academy and in 1748
another to be Johann I Bernoulli’s successor in Basel. He had kept in close contact
with the Petersburg Academy and knew that it had lost members. He declined both
offers, arguing that mathematicians are past their prime at thirty, and he was nearly
forty. This view of mathematicians has endured.
At the Berlin Academy a further dispute erupted with the Wolffians, known as the
Maupertuis–König affair, destined to be the foremost scientific dispute of the
century. Maupertuis claimed priority for the principle of least action and its
universality. In 1749 the Swiss mathematician Johann Samuel König (1712–57), a
new member of the Berlin Academy, credited Leibniz with priority basing his
argument on a letter of 1707 to Jakob Hermann. After a search in Leipzig, Basel,
and other areas holding Leibniz manuscripts produced no letter, Euler pronounced
the judgment of the academy. Defending the honors of a great man, it found that the
letter was a fraud. At the academy Johann Bernhard Merian (1723–1807) provided
the strongest support for Euler in this dispute. Critics claimed that this judgment was
a setback for freedom of the press and reflected elitism. Euler alone was able to
devise differential equations for the principle of least action and prove its universal-
ity. In 1752, with Voltaire visiting Frederick II, the debate turned from a scientific to
a literary controversy. Voltaire, who was competing for royal favor, wrote separate
pieces that were collected into a pamphlet Diatribe du Docteur Akakia, médecin du
Pape (Story of Doctor Akakia, physician to the Pope) that ridiculed and pilloried
Maupertuis. Voltaire praised Euler but presented him as Maupertuis’s lieutenant-
general. The pamphlet became very popular and harmed Maupertuis’s reputation.
Frederick II had it burned in public, and he wrote an anonymous pamphlet in
French, entitled ‘A letter of a Berlin academician’ defending the academy.
In 1750 Euler’s brother died, and his mother accepted his invitation to move from
Basel to Berlin. Euler and his wife met her at a relative’s home in Frankfurt. In 1753
he purchased for her an estate in Charlottenburg, near Berlin. It had residences of
nobles and the monarch. Euler sent the younger children and a tutor to live with his
mother. The estate was about a mile from the family house in Berlin. For relaxation,
exercises, thinking in solitude, and visits with his mother and children; Euler often
took walks to Charlottenburg.
Among Euler’s tasks were state projects. Frederick II assigned him to grading the
brine in Schönbeck salt mines, to aid in building dams and bridges in eastern Friesland,
and to lead in planning the leveling of the Finow Canal between the Oder and Havel
Rivers, which he did by changing the pressure in its many locks. He was also assigned to
raising the height of fountains for the new palace of Sansouci and designing a lottery to
increase state income. Euler won the lottery once. Wars had devastated the Prussian
economy. As time passed, the king increased the number of state projects15.

14
Calinger R S 2016 Leonhard Euler: Mathematical Genius in the Enlightenment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press), ch 11, p. 377.
15
Ibid., ch 12, pp 429–31.

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In the years just before 1756 the physical cause of electricity was a frequent topic
of Euler. In 1752 he obtained a copy of Benjamin Franklin’s Experiments and
Observations on Electricity in French translation. He was saddened to learn in July
1753 of the death of Georg Richmann in St. Petersburg, while Richmann was
making measurements related to Franklin’s kite experiment on lightning. The
project had not taken the necessary precautions.
Another major project of Euler during the 1750s was to improve lenses for
telescopes and other optical equipment. In England the Royal Society believed that
he was criticizing Newton. Actually he was attempting to develop differential
equations for his ideas. He and John Dollond, who corrected Newton’s optical
experiments, competed as they worked to reduce chromatic dispersion.
After Euler failed in 1753 to be elected a foreign member of the Paris Academy,
he was named in 1755 an associate member. Probably Clairaut helped with his
appointment. From June 1754, Euler corresponded with Joseph-Louis Lagrange
(1736–1813). They began with Lagrange’s rich ideas in the calculus of variations and
expanded to primary numbers. Euler withheld his publications on the calculus of
variations, so Lagrange would receive due credit for his discoveries.
In May 1755 Euler and Johann Tobias Mayer (1712–62) decided to enter the
competition for the 20 000 sterling prize of the British parliament for producing
accurate enough lunar tables to find longitude at sea to within a half degree. Euler
believed that Mayer had refined the equations given in his Paris prize paper of 1748
and had better observations from the latest telescopes that produced lunar tables
that were superior and could provide this. Thus the prize should go to him. Euler
was also secretly trying to recruit Mayer for the Berlin Academy. Euler said that
D’Alembert’s claim to have such lunar tables Euler was just bragging. The British
could not test Mayer’s tables and longitudinal method because of the Seven Years
War (1756–63), and in 1762 he died. The next year his wife sent to London Mayer’s
final manuscript with corrected tables of lunar and solar motion. The prize was
awarded in 1765, when the English clockmaker John Harrison (1693–1776) invented
the first naval chronometer giving longitude, and it was tested at sea. It had better
results of longitude than those found the year before by the lunar method. The
British parliament had wanted an English winner. In 1765 Harrison received half of
the parliamentary award, 10 000 pounds. Mayer’s wife was given 300 pounds. Euler
was surprised and delighted to receive a gift of 3 pounds from the Board of
Longitude of the British parliament. Although the marine chronometer was widely
acquired and employed, for more than a century the British Nautical Almanacks
contained Mayer’s lunar tables computed by Euler’s method and equations. In his
second lunar theory, developed continuously from 1764 to 1772, Euler developed
lunar tables better than the semi-empirical ones of Mayer and Clairaut that were
clearer and easier to use.
The year 1760 had brought a new prize and war losses. Euler wrote papers for his
sons. His son Karl, a physician, won the Paris prize on the average variable motion
of planets. That year was roughly the midpoint of the Seven Year War. It was going
badly for Frederick II. In October 1760 the Russians and later the Austrians entered
Berlin. Many had fled the city before the Russian arrival, but not Euler. The Russian

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general Count Gottlob Totleben had promised safety for Euler’s estate. But when
the Prussian troops withdrew, the Cossacks advanced rapidly before the general’s
assurance reached them. Totleben exclaimed that he had not come to make war on
the sciences. He reimbursed Euler, who submitted bills for all losses. Empress
Elizabeth (1709–1762) paid him a second time by sending him an additional 4000
rubles.
By 1761 relations with Frederick II had so deteriorated that Euler seriously
contemplated leaving Berlin. He was cosmopolitan and not bound by early national
interests. A letter of May 17 to Gerhard Müller, the secretary of the Petersburg
Academy, declared that he had sold the Charlottenburg estate, so no reason existed
to remain in Berlin. In 1763 he was alarmed that Jean d’Alembert would be offered
the presidency of the Berlin Academy and accept, but he declined, choosing to
remain in Paris. Instead d’Alembert recommended Euler for the post, which was not
granted, and a raise, which was done. From his salary, prize monies, and invest-
ments, Euler was wealthy for a man of the middle class. D’Alembert asked to meet
with Euler and was astounded by his colossal memory, his extraordinary knowledge
by heart of computation formulas, and the clarity of his logic. The two became good
friends. By correspondence d’Alembert became ‘the secret president’ of the Berlin
Academy. From the close of the Seven Years’ War in 1763–6, Euler remained at the
Berlin Academy, even as his position deteriorated. Frederick II assumed the
presidency and took away from Euler the selection of new members. He had
opposed the selection of Gotthold Lessing, famous German writer, as a member.
Euler also lost control of finances. The king established an economic commission. A
nasty quarrel erupted over the sale of almanacs, which was managed by David
Köhler. Euler defended Köhler, who actually pocketed some of the tax monies
collected. To raise income for the state, Euler proposed a new lottery and a porcelain
industry.
From 1762 to 1766, Euler was working on four books besides his articles. He was
writing three multivolume books that were not published until he was in St.
Petersburg. For the first, the Letters to a German Princess (E343, E344, and
E417), he gathered and edited the individual letters and wanted them to be a
textbook. It was completed and ready for publication before he left Berlin, but funds
did not exist for the printing and Frederick II did not support it. After the Seven
Years’ War the Berlin Academy had only limited funds. In August 1766, Euler
submitted to the academy his monumental three volume Institutionum Calculi
Integralis (E342, E366, and E385) that completes his trilogy on calculus. In 1765
Euler submitted an article on dioptrics. His Dioptricae (E367, E386, and E404),
published from 1769 to 1771, is a didactic work that contains the general theory of
optics and lenses for telescopes and microscopes. On the title page Euler indicated
that he was assisted in his computations by his sons Johann Albrecht and Karl
together with Wolfgang Krafft and Joannis Lexell. From 1764 Euler worked
continuously on his 775 page landmark text in three lengthy volumes, Theoria
Motuum Lunae, Nova Methodo Pertractata (Theory of lunar motion, treated by
means of a new method, E418). It was the most advanced lunar theory of the time.

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In 1765 one text was published in Berlin. It was Euler’s Theoria Motus Corporum
Solidorum (E289, E418). This landmark book is the final piece in his thirty-year
study of mechanics. Euler had previously provided differential equations for fluid,
elastic, and flexible bodies. This work stresses rotational motion, which was new.
The Theoria Motus Corporum Solidorum designed the mathematical algorithms and
methods for dealing with the motion of rigid or hard bodies. It is often called Euler’s
Second Mechanics.
In 1765 Euler no longer attended meetings with the Berlin Academy. Early the
next year two requests for permission to leave were met with silence. When Russian
Catherine II (1728–1796) learned of Euler’s interest in returning to Russia, she was
determined to have a distinguished science academy and ordered the Russian
ambassador to Berlin to negotiate with him and grant him whatever he wanted.
He was to receive an annual salary of 3000 gold rubles, roughly twice the first offer,
a widow’s pension of 1000 gold rubles for his wife, a professorship in the Petersburg
Academy with a salary of 1000 gold rubles for Johann Albrecht, and positions for
his younger sons. The academy was also to help recruit about seven young scholars
to help with Euler’s research, especially computations. They became the Euler circle.

3.4 Return to the Petersburg Academy: a vigorous autumn, 1766–83

In 1766 Euler’s first two requests for release from the Berlin Academy received no
reply from Frederick II. But Catherine had already had her ambassador negotiate
with Euler. Frederick II did not want to antagonize his ‘dear sister’. In February
1766 permission was granted after a third letter. On 29 May the Euler family, except
for the youngest son, and servants left. A small group, including Frederick Henry
and his two daughters, came to say farewell. The family traveled first to Warsaw,
where Euler received honors. On 25 June they arrived in St. Petersburg. Euler was
fifty-three. Catherine II generously sent him 10 800 rubles to purchase a two-storey
house with furniture on Vasilievski Island on the Great Neva River. Thus began
another very busy period in Euler’s life, in which he wrote 415 articles and books, or
roughly half of his total publications (figure 3.4).
In May 1771 a great fire broke out on Vasilievski Island behind the Petersburg
Academy. About 550 wooden and a few brick houses were lost. A Basler handyman,
Peter Grimm, put a ladder to the second floor of the Euler house and saved Euler,
nearly blind from a cataract, by carrying him over his shoulder. Euler wanted to stay
and save his papers. Catherine II covered the loss in the fire by giving him 6000
rubles to reconstruct the house and buy furniture. In September 1771 Euler hoped to
have his vision restored. Euler had followed new operations in Paris on the subject of
cataracts. An eye surgeon, Baron Jakob Michael von Wenzel (1724–90), had
developed early cataract surgery. He was brought to St. Petersburg. There was
rejoicing when after an operation Euler’s vision was restored. But within a month he
was again nearly blind and in occasional pain. He said that with the loss of sight he
had ‘one less distraction’.
In 1773 Euler asked Daniel Bernoulli to recommend an assistant from Basel.
Bernoulli made an excellent choice, Nicholas Fuss (1755–1826), who served as Euler’s

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 Leonhard Euler’s Letters to a German Princess

Figure 3.4. Leonhard Euler by Joseph Darbes (1778).

Source: http://eulerarchive.maa.org/portraits/portraits.html.

personal secretary. He became important in the Euler circle, which included Johann
Albrecht Euler, Mikhail Evseevic Golovin, Anders Johann Lexell, and Stepan
Rumovskij. They worked in the study of Euler’s house with a large table in the
middle of the room. Euler would exercise by walking around the table when they were
not present. From Euler’s rubbing his hands on it during his walks, its edges were
shiny. In September of 1773 French writer Denis Diderot (1713–1784), the editor of
the multivolume Encyclopédie and critic of religion, arrived for a visit. In November
he spoke at the academy. Euler, who chaired the session, treated him quite properly.
There was no argument at the academy, as is sometimes mistakenly thought.
There was, however, one later with Franz Aepinus, a German physics professor
(1724–1802). In November 1773 Euler’s wife Katharina died. Euler refused to follow
the custom of the elderlys being cared for by their children. At Christmas 1775 he
proposed to a friend of his wife, but his sons blocked this. He next quietly proposed in
1776 to his wife’s half-sister, Salome Abigail, née Gsell. They married in July.
In January 1783 Princess Ekaterina Romanovna Dashkova (1743–1810) was
named by Empress Catherine II to be director of the Petersburg Academy16. She

16
Calinger R S and Polyakhova E N 2007 Princess Dashkova, Euler, and the Russian Academy of Sciences
Leonhard Euler: Life, Work and Legacy ed R E Bradley and C E Sandifer (London: Elsevier), pp 75–95.

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initially asked to decline the offer but knew that Catherine II would insist17. Princess
Dashkova met with the academicians and announced that she would be available for
discussions of issues. She asked Euler to be on his arm as she entered the academy.
He was honored and agreed. He had not been visiting the academy since 1777.
Princess Dashkova describes the inauguration scene in detail in her Memoirs18.
Princess Dashkova was to end the mismanagement of the academy and raise more
funds for it. In 1783 she was named a member of Benjamin Franklin’s American
Philosophical Society in Philadelphia by Franklin himself; she was the only woman
member for the next eighty years. In 2018, the American Philosophical Society in
Philadelphia issued a greeting to the participants of the XXIII International
Dashkova Readings, dedicated to the 275th anniversary of the birth of Princess
Dashkova: ‘The society proudly notes that incomparable Princess Dashkova invited
in 1789 to the Philosophical Society, was the first and remains the only woman so
honored for another 80 years … Clearly Benjamin Franklin recognized Princess
Dashkova as an intellectual equal. Today we would say she was an extraordinary—
possibly unparalleled—woman of her time19.’ In 1789 Dashkova reciprocated by
making him the first American member of the Russian Academy20.
Princess Dashkova initiated construction of the new building of the Russian
Academy of Sciences next to the Kunstkamera. It was built in 1790s after Euler’s
death. Euler’s scientific legacy continues to be researched and developed in the
Russian Academy of Sciences and the Berlin Academy of Sciences. Euler’s scientific
legacy continues to be researched and developed in the Russian Academy of
Sciences (figure 3.5) and the Berlin Academy of Sciences (figure 3.6).
In his last years Euler remained active in fields that included number theory with
studies of pentagonal numbers and the prime number theorem, rational mechanics
that includes his proving in three dimensions the vectorial character of moments in
physics, the perfection of his treatment of the buckling of columns in 1780, and
perturbations in the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn in astronomy, together with
hydrodynamics, elasticity and acoustics. In April 1773 his last book was published,
Théorie Complete de la Construction et de Maneuver des Vaisseaux, Mise la Portée
des (!) Ceux, qui s’Appliquant à la Navigation (Complete theory of the construction
and maneuver of ships brought into the reach of everyone involved in navigation,
E426). It was his second ship theory. Euler also served on the academy’s
technological committee. He was convinced that the improvement of telescopes
and microscopes was critical to the advancement of the sciences. He reviewed
proposals, including three from Ivan Petrovich Kulibin (1735–1818), for a one-arch
stone and wooden bridge across the Neva river. Since Kulibin, the engineer and

17
Woronzoff-Dashkoff A I 2008 Dashkova: A Life of Influence and Exile (Philadelphia, PA: American
Philosophical Society).
18
Dashkova E 1995 The Memoirs of Princess Dashkova: Russia in the Time of Catherine the Great ed K
Fitzlyon (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press).
19
Tychinina L 2018 Catherine the Great and Princess Dashkova: View from XXI Century.
20
Wilford J N 2006 ‘Russian Princess Stands With Franklin as Comrade of the Enlightenment’ New York
Times (March 14, 2006) https://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/14/science/14prin.html.

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Russian inventor, had a workshop close to the Euler’s house, as long as it was
possible Euler would often walk there.
To 1783 Euler continued in his study his complex computations with his circle.
On 18 September 1783 Lexell came to have lunch with Euler and work on problems

Figure 3.5. The building of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Photograph by Carlos Dorce.
Source: https://themathematicaltourist.wordpress.com/2012/12/30/the-russian-academy-of-sciences/#
jp-carousel-490.

Figure 3.6. The Berlin Academy of Sciences and Arts in the twentieth century.
Source: http://blogs.plymouth.ac.uk/artsinstitute/wp-content/uploads/sites/60/2016/06/akademie_der_wissen-
schaften.jpg.

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 Leonhard Euler’s Letters to a German Princess

Figure 3.7. Leonhard Euler’s bust at the Kunstkamera by Jean-Dominique Rachette (1785).
Source: http://www.eduspb.com/node/1535.

of balloon aerostatics from the ascents of the Montgolfier brothers in Paris and
computing the path of Herschel’s planet, Uranus. Euler told Lexell that he was
finally totally blind. After lunch Euler felt faint and took a nap. At about 5:00 pm
he was playing with a grandson whom he had tutored earlier. He asked his wife for a
second cup of tea. Suddenly his pipe fell from his hand. When he bent to pick it up he
clasped his hands to his forehead and uttered ‘Ich sterbe’ (‘I am dying’). He suffered
a stroke and lost consciousness. After several unsuccessful efforts to revive him, he
was pronounced dead at 11:00 pm. The death of the great Euler was news across
Europe. It was reported by the four major science academies in London, Paris,
Berlin, and St. Petersburg as well as in Basel, Lisbon, Munich, Stockholm, and
Turin. Euler’s death was treated as a notable public loss. He was buried in the
Evangelical Lutheran section of the Smolensk Cemetery on the Vasilievsky Island.
Condorcet and Fuss delivered the two major eulogies for him.
At the Petersburg Academy Princess Dashkova demanded that a half-length
marble bust be made by a French sculptor, Jean-Dominique Rachette (figure 3.7).
Its officers installed that work in the library hall at the Kunstkamera, the main
building of the academy at that time. This scene was depicted in the silhouette by

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Johann Friedrich Anthing, a German artist. The second figure on the left holding the
bust is Euler’s eldest son Johann Albrecht Euler (figure 3.8).
St. Petersburg had such heavy rains that by the early nineteenth century, not even
Fuss, who participated in the funeral, could find the modest gravestone of Euler. It
was rediscovered in 1832. The decision was made to move Euler’s grave to the

Figure 3.8. Silhouette by Anting, 1784.

Source: http://az.lib.ru/img/l/litwinowa_e_f/text_1892_eiler/text_1892_eiler-2.jpg.

Figure 3.9. Euler’s gravestone, Lazarev Cemetery, St. Petersburg.

Source: http://amorbidfascination.blogspot.com/2010/03/lazarev-cemetery-st-petersburg.html.

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 Leonhard Euler’s Letters to a German Princess

Figure 3.10. Leonhard Euler lunar crater.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euler_(crater)#/media/File:Euler_crater_AS17-M-2922.jpg.

Lazarev Cemetery of the Alexander Nevskiy Monastery (Lavra) located near

St. Petersburg’s main street, Nevskiy Prospect. A simple monument (figure 3.9),
which still exists, was constructed out of pink Finnish granite with the inscription
Leonhardo Eulero, Academia Petropolitana 20 meters away from Lomonosov’s
tombstone.
In 1973, a stony asteroid from the inner regions of the asteroid belt, approx-
imately 17 kilometers in diameter, was named 2002 Euler to honor Euler’s
contributions to the developments of science and mathematics. Euler’s name was
also given to a 28 km lunar crater, Leonhard Euler (figure 3.10).

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 IOP Concise Physics

Leonhard Euler’s Letters to a German Princess

A milestone in the history of physics textbooks and more
Ronald S Calinger, Ekaterina (Katya) Denisova and Elena N Polyakhova

Chapter 4
Selected letters from Volume 1 (letters 1–79)1

In this and the next chapter, we have selected some of the most important topics of
Euler’s letters, which may be of interest to physics educators or those with interest in
history and philosophy of science. The excerpts from the Letters included in this
chapter are taken from an 1802 publication by Murray and Highley, J. Cutrell,
Vernor and Hood, Longman and Rees, Wynn and Scholey, G. Cawthorn,
J. Harding, and J. Mawman. Please see the References for better quality modern
publications of the Letters.

4.1 Sound
Euler frames his ideas on sound around his theory of music, the topics for which he
was passionate. He reformulates the ordering of musical intervals on a new
mathematical basis and introduces a new criterion based on pleasure. To explain
his ideas, he treats an octave as a simple interval, and its numerical expression can be
written as a simple proportion.

1
https://archive.org/details/letterseulertoa00eulegoog.

doi:10.1088/2053-2571/aae6d2ch4 4-1 ª Morgan & Claypool Publishers 2019

 Leonhard Euler’s Letters to a German Princess

4.1.1 Letter 3. Of sound and its velocity

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4.1.2 Letter 5. Of unison and octaves

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4.2 Composition of atmosphere

In letter 15 Euler describes what happens to air when it is exposed to heat or cold,
and outlines the connection between elasticity of air and its density. The concept of
ideal gas was not known yet, but Euler’s ideas became foundations of Charles’ law.

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4.2.1 Letter 15. Changes produced in the atmosphere by heat and cold

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4.3 Nature of light

Similarly to sound, Euler treats light as a vibration in the ether. His strong
opposition to Newton’s corpuscular optics did not mean that Euler was anti-
Newtonian, but that he found fault with Newton’s optics, particularly with reflection
and refraction. Indeed, Newton’s optics could not to explain these two phenomena.

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In terms of application of ether to the light theory as the contradiction to Newton’s

corpuscular light theory, it was the conceptual prediction of the wave theory of light
presented as certain vibrations of ether.

4.3.1 Letter 17. Of light, and the systems of Descartes and Newton

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4.3.2 Letter 20. Of the propagation of light

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4.3.3 Letter 19. A different system respecting the nature of rays and of light, proposed
(ether)

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4.3.4 Letter 28. Nature of colors in particular

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4.3.5 Letter 31. Refraction of rays of different colors

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4.4 Optics and optical instruments

In the Letters, Euler studied the optics of a human eye: considering the eye lens
biconvex, he arrives at a geometric optics formula for the human eye. He also
introduces a method to calculate the refraction coefficient for two media. Euler
describes the human eye as an ideal optical object: its nature elegantly combines
various media with different optical properties (refraction coefficients) so that the
human eye, as an optic system, does not experience chromatic aberration. At that
time, the issue of chromatic aberrations of optical instruments (microscopes,

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telescopes) presented a serious challenge, as it limited the quality of imaging of both

macro and micro objects. Isaac Newton believed that chromatic aberrations are a
natural characteristic of any optical device and are unavoidable. Euler, however,
shows that an achromatic lens was quite possible to engineer by combining two
lenses with different refraction coefficients. He includes detailed calculations of
optical systems for microscopes and telescopes. Euler’s achromatic lens was later
manufactured by the English optician John Dollond in 1758. In the Letters, Euler
continuously repeats the notion that no human engineer would ever be able to create
such an ideal optical instrument as a human eye. He suggested to build an optical
system, in which two convex–concave lenses with one common axis are facing each
other and the space between them is filled with water.
Euler was wrong in his assumption that lenses in human and animal eyes are free
of aberration defect. As it was shown later, many optical imperfections of a human
eye are compensated by its biomechanics and the brain’s ability to interpret signals
from the eye nerve. Euler did not study the eye’s biomechanical properties, which
affect, in particular, the lens’ curvature and its refractive property. However, Euler’s
fundamental work on optics and the popular explanation in the Letters of the
physics behind the human eye as an optical system greatly influenced generations of
mathematicians, physicists, and physiologists working on the development of the
theory of the eye’s biomechanics.

4.4.1 Letter 43. Farther continuation. Difference between the eye of an animal, and
the artificial eye, or camera obscura

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4.5 Gravity
When discussing gravity, Euler explains that when objects are said to be heavy, they
possess gravity and he characterizes falling down as a consequent behavior of bodies
that possess gravity. He also explains why the Moon neither falls down to Earth nor
moves in a straight line. Letters 52 and 53 describe Newton’s law of gravitation and
the so-called great inequality of Jupiter and Saturn. Euler investigated this problem
by studying the Sun–Jupiter–Saturn three-body problem. Can there be such a
mutual gravitational interaction which leaves the Solar system stable? Euler proved
that irregularities of the two planets’ motion were due to their mutual attraction.

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The problem was solved later, in the early nineteenth century: since Jupiter goes
around the Sun five times while Saturn goes around the Sun twice, after every five
orbits Jupiter receives the perturbation from Saturn, always in the same parts of
orbit, the so-called resonant commensurability 5:2. After some time Jupiter will slow
down and Saturn will speed up. The alternative changes of speed happen with
periodicity of 929 years; the system is stable.

4.5.1 Letter 45. Of gravity, considered a general property of body

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4.5.2 Letter 51. Gravity of the Moon

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4.5.3 Letter 52. Discovery of universal Gravitation by Newton

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4.5.4 Letter 53. Continuation. Of the mutual attraction of the heavenly bodies

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4.6 Tides
During the early eighteenth century, a Cartesian–Newtonian controversy existed in
western continental Europe, mainly at the Paris Academy. The goal was to find
which had superior methods to obtain exact answers. In the prefaces and body of the
Principia mathematica, Newton recommended studies on the shape of Earth, the
tides, the orbit of comets, lunar motion, and the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn to
determine whether Cartesian science with its theory of vortices or Newtonian
dynamics with its inverse square law of gravitational attraction was more accurate.
In 1740 the tides were the topic for the annual prize of the Paris Academy. The
Cartesians had already lost the debate over the shape of Earth. In 1740 Euler, Daniel
Bernoulli, and two others shared the prize. While Bernoulli employed a Newtonian
explanation, Euler rejected Galileo’s account that the motion of Earth caused the
tides and Descartes’ view that the Moon alone did this. Euler still believed that a
small adjustment was needed in Newton’s gravitation law. He began with Kepler’s
forces. He showed that the forces of the Sun and Moon influence the tides and
developed the calculus integrals to compute the motion of the tides. He had
developed the calculus beyond Newton’s early stage. With regard to the
Cartesian–Newtonian controversy, in letter 64 Euler began by rejecting Descartes’
tidal theory and giving Newton’s inverse square law as the starting point for
explaining the tides. In the Cartesian–Newtonian controversy at the Paris Academy,
the Cartesians had by 1740 mostly lost.

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4.6.1 Letter 63. Different opinions of philosophers respecting the flux and reflux of the
sea

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4.6.2 Letter 64. Explanation of the flux and reflux, from the attractive power of the
Moon

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4.7 Principle of least action

Pierre Moureau de Maupertuis, the president of the Berlin Academy, claimed
priority for the principle of least action based on articles from 1741 to 1746, and its
universality. In an article in Acta eruditorum in 1751, Johann Samuel König held
that Leibniz had stated it in a missing letter from 1707. Euler, who actually deserved
credit from his Methodus inveniendi, tried to stay out of the argument, but after a
search of Leibniz’s documents failed to produce the letter, announced the judgment
by a vote of the Berlin Academy: the letter was a fraud. Euler later provided the
mathematics for what is now called the Euler–Maupertuis principle and proved its
universality. Voltaire was visiting Frederick II, who supported Maupertuis, the

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president of the Berlin Academy. Voltaire wrote the pamphlet Dr Akakia. This made
the Maupertuis–König affair both scientific and literary. Dr Akakia, which pilloried
Maupertuis, became very popular. Later Condorcet criticized Euler for what he
considered the Academy’s and Euler’s harsh decision.

4.7.1 Letter 78. The same subject. Principle of the least possible action

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 IOP Concise Physics

Leonhard Euler’s Letters to a German Princess

A milestone in the history of physics textbooks and more
Ronald S Calinger, Ekaterina (Katya) Denisova and Elena N Polyakhova

Chapter 5
Selected letters from Volume 2 (letters 80–154)
and Volume 3 (letters 155–234)1

5.1 Liberty, happiness, and truth

The Letters to a German Princess were written at the height of the eighteenth-century
Enlightenment. Its main headquarters was in Paris with a group known as the
philosophes, most notably Montesquieu, Diderot, d’Alembert, and Voltaire, and the
salons of a few women. There were other important locations: England, Scotland,
German lands, Italian cities, imperial Russia, Sweden, and the new United States of
America. The philosophes, known as the party of humanity, applied critical reason to
fixed beliefs, sought freedom of thought and action, and attacked religious fanaticism,
especially repression and cruelty. The most noteworthy publication was Denis Diderot’s
28 volume Encyclopédie (1751–72). It was not simply an accumulation of knowledge: it
gave prominence to the sciences and attempted to change the ‘general way of thinking’.
Among the crucial issues that Euler addressed were freedom or liberty, happiness,
and methods to find truth. Liberty, he wrote, is essential to all spiritual beings, and not
even God can divest beings of it. He rejected the Wolffians, who put the body on the
same footing with the mind and the soul. Actions depend on motives. The motives for
spirits are always voluntary. To life and liberty, the Enlightenment law from William
Blackstone and philosophy added happiness. Euler held that the disposition to attain
supreme happiness was through the love of God and the pursuit of virtue. In the
previous century scholars and clerics had disputed whether faith in the Scriptures or
reason was superior to reach truths. To resolve the many Enlightenment disputes,
Euler divided all knowledge as was done in his time into three classes: historical (from

1
In this chapter, we are using excerpts of the 1853 publication of the Letters by Harper and Brothers. The
numbering of the letters is different from that used in modern publications. (https://books.google.com/books?
id=hFTkAAAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=Letters+of+Euler+to+a+German+Princess,+on+Different+
Subjects+in+Physics+and+Philosophy,+Volume+2&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjDwuW3qurcAhXxpVkKHb
FRBb4Q6AEIUjAH#v=onepage&q&f=false).

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 Leonhard Euler’s Letters to a German Princess

the senses, empirical), reason (from demonstrations based on principles), and faith
(from persons worthy of credit and the Scriptures). The first two classes can be proven,
but the third class is most subject to disagreement.

5.1.1 Letter 85. Of the liberty of spirits; and a reply to objection against liberty

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5.1.2 Letter 91. The liberty of intelligent beings in harmony with the doctrines of the
christian religion

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5.1.3 Letter 97. Refutation of the idealists

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5.1.4 Letter 114. Of true happiness. Conversion of sinners

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5.1.5 Letter 115. The true foundation of human knowledge. Sources of truth, and
classes of information derived from it

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5.2 Systems of monads and pre-established harmony

At the core of Gottfried Leibniz’s system of thought are the pre-established harmony
and the monadic doctrine. Since Leibniz’s monads are windowless, they cannot
interact with their surroundings. The pre-established harmony deals with the causal
relations between mind and body. This contributed to a debate over causation in the
seventeenth century. According to the pre-established harmony, every non-mirac-
ulous state of a substance is programmed at creation. Leibniz likened this to two
synchronized clocks between mind and body running together for all eternity, but
with total independence of the other. Although God could build a perfect machine,
Euler found innate ideas as the source of knowledge absurd. Observational
confirmation for the influence of the body upon the soul and mind did not exist.
Euler appealed to psychotheology to try to refute the pre-established harmony. He
called the thought that the soul acts on even the smallest particle of matter pretense.
He saw an infinite difference between the soul and body, and the regulations between
the soul and body are not a cause but are voluntary. Another objection was that all
actions since Creation must be in conformity to it. Thus, the pre-established
harmony was ‘utterly destructive to human liberty’, letter 94.

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5.2.1 Letter 76. System of monads of Wolff

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5.2.2 Letter 125. Of monads

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5.2.3 Letter 83. Examination of the system of pre-established harmony. An objection

to it

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5.3 Calculation of longitude and latitude

Letters 155–68 from vol III are devoted to the astronomical solution to the practical
problem of navigation in an open sea. Euler made many contributions to the Moon

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theory: explanation of the lunar motion irregularity and calculation of lunar tables.
He started a prize competition in St. Petersburg Imperial Academy of Sciences to
explore whether the motion of the Moon agrees with the Newtonian theory of
gravitation. He invited two outstanding French scientists, A C Clairaut (1713–65)
and J L d’Alembert (1717–83), to take part in the competition in 1753. Clairaut won
the prize for his lunar theory development2.
Understanding of lunar motion was of prime commercial interest in the eight-
eenth century. To emphasize its importance, the British Parliament promised in its
1714 Longitude Act a prize of 20 000 Sterling for the first scholar who could
determine the geographical longitude of a ship at open sea with the accuracy of half-
a-degree, which corresponds to about 50 km close to the Equator. In an open ocean
the only reference points are the stars in the sky, as well as the Moon and the Sun.
At that time, it was clear that a practical solution to this problem required
accurate lunar tables. The tables would tell exactly where the Moon is in the sky
relative to the fixed stars at a given moment of universal time (Greenwich Mean
Time). ‘Reading the time by the Moon’ was a simple matter of comparing it to the
local time and calculating the longitude based on the difference.
Euler was awarded 300 pounds Sterling in 1763 from the Board of Longitude for
the tables, which were based on his lunar theory. Afterward, the French government
gave him an award. The tables were actually calculated and sent to Greenwich by
German astronomer Tobias Mayer (1723–62). Mayer’s widow was awarded 3000
pounds from the British Parliament fund. Euler’s method of longitude determination
in open sea was used by navigators even after John Harrison’s invention (1765) of a
marine chronometer. Later, the effective production of naval chronometers began
worldwide. John Harrison (1693–1776), an English clockmaker, invented the first
naval chronometer. He received half of the major prize of 20 000 Sterling for
developing a naval chronometer which gave longitude better than the lunar method,
and which was successfully tested the year before. The marine chronometer was
widely adopted and used. However, Mayer’s lunar tables based on Euler’s method
and his equations of lunar motion remained in British nautical almanacks and aided
sea travels and navigators for more than a century3.
From 1764 on, Euler had prepared his 775-page work Theoria Motuum Lunae,
Nova Methodo Pertractata (The theory of lunar motion, treated by means of a new
method), published in 1772, which is generally taken to constitute his second lunar
theory. His first theory (see above) was in the late 1740s as Theoria Motus Lunae…
(Theory of the Moon…) Euler produced his own lunar tables, which were better
than the semi-empirical ones of Mayer and Clairaut and clearer and easier to use.
Thus, while Newton had created the geometrical form of celestial mechanics, Euler
founded its analytical form through his research in astronomy on his first theory of
1740 and especially in his second Theoria Motuum Lunae… of 1772. Euler’s lunar
theories were the most advanced of the time, and even today this part of the
manuscript commentary remains a popular reference for modern astronomers.

2
Bodenmann S 2010 The 18th century battle over lunar motion Physics Today (Jan), pp 27–32.
3
Howse D 1980 Greenwich Time and the Discovery of the Longitude (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

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5.3.1 Letter 160. Method of determining the latitude, or the elevation of the pole

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5.3.2 Letter 167. The motion of Moon a fifth method

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5.3.3 Letter 168. Advantages of this last Method: its degree of precision

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5.4 Electricity and magnetism

Euler employs his concept of the properties of ether to explain electric and magnetic
phenomena. He highlights the common nature of electricity and magnetism, even
though based on the ether theory. The modern reader will find a huge gap that
separates Euler’s mathematically precise mechanics with the almost ‘colloquial’
physics of electromagnetism. The century between Euler’s Letters and Maxwell’s
work on electromagnetism was a period of colossal progress in terms of perceptions
of the scientific community of physics’ capacity as an area of knowledge and what it
is able to do.

5.4.1 Letter 139. The true principle of nature on which are founded all the phenomena
of electricity (from volume 2)

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5.4.2 Letter 176. True magnetic direction; subtile matter which produces the magnetic
power

5.4.3 Letter 177. Nature of magnetic matter, and its rapid current. Magnetic canals

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 IOP Concise Physics

Leonhard Euler’s Letters to a German Princess

A milestone in the history of physics textbooks and more
Ronald S Calinger, Ekaterina (Katya) Denisova and Elena N Polyakhova

Chapter 6
Afterword

This work has examined the Letters to a German Princess, a masterpiece by the pre-
eminent mathematician, scientist, and educator of the eighteenth century. It
provides for the first time in English its context in the history of science and reviews
his pedagogical mastery. Written 250 years ago, this book has been translated into
about a dozen languages and more than a hundred editions; yet, it remains unknown
to most physics-teaching practitioners of today.
During the Enlightenment Era, Euler’s physics became the turning point from the
medieval static teaching methods and the Cartesian foundations of the fifteenth
century to a new physics horizon. There was already the new physics, the
fundamentals of which we recognize today, created in Europe by the great
Newton and Euler. Physics was brought to North America where it was further
developed by Franklin and other great minds. By their efforts, the new physics
succeeded in obtaining the coordinates origin.
Our goal was to demonstrate conceptual arguments and more precise measure-
ments with new instruments between the Newtonians and Cartesians, mainly at the
Paris Academy and the Newtonians with the Leibnizians and Wolffians. The battle
in astronomy involved arguments and better measurements involving the shape of
Earth, and irregularities in lunar motion, as well as mechanics with analytical
mechanics, fluid dynamics, and priority for the principle of least possible actions.
The reader can see from our work that the new physics successfully won all these
significant disputes, and its triumph paved the way to twentieth century physics.
It is our hope that in addition to historians of science, this book about a book will
be of interest to physics teachers and informal educators looking for unique ways of
making the teaching of conceptual physics meaningful and applicable to learners’
experiences. As science education is moving away from concept regurgitation to
sense-making of the natural phenomena, the Letters to a German Princess presents a
collection of powerful teaching ideas to give learners from all backgrounds and
walks of life access to the understanding of the beauty of the natural world.

doi:10.1088/2053-2571/aae6d2ch6 6-1 ª Morgan & Claypool Publishers 2019

 IOP Concise Physics

Leonhard Euler’s Letters to a German Princess

A milestone in the history of physics textbooks and more
Ronald S Calinger, Ekaterina (Katya) Denisova and Elena N Polyakhova

Chapter 7
Selected bibliography

Physics texts (in chronological order)

Rogers E M 1960 Physics for the Inquiring Mind (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press)
Resnick R and Halliday D 1966 Physics I & II (New York: Wiley) (Tokyo: Toppan)
Orear J 1967 Fundamental Physics (New York: Wiley)
Taffel A 1973 Physics Its Methods and Meanings (Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon)
Rutherford F J, Holton G J and Watson F G 1975 Project Physics: Text and Handbook (New
York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston)
Halliday D and Resnick R 1981 Fundamentals of Physics (New York: Wiley)
Holt R 1981 Project Physics (New York: Holt Rinehart and Winston)
Murphy J T and Smoot R C 1982 Physics: Principles and Problems (Columbus, OH: Charles E.
Merrill)
Haber-Schaim U, Walter J A and Dodge J H 1986 PSSC Physics (Lexington, MA: DC Heath and
Company)
Hewitt P G 2002 Conceptual Physics (San Francisco, CA: Pearson)
Young H D, Freedman R A and Ford A L 2006 Sears and Zemansky’s University Physics
(San Francisco, CA: Pearson Education)
Young H D, Freedman R A and Ford L 2007 University Physics (San Francisco, CA: Pearson
Education)
Feynman R P, Leighton R B and Sands M 2011 The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Vol. I: The
New Millennium Edition: Mainly Mechanics, Radiation, and Heat vol 1 (New York: Basic
Books)
Rogers E M 2011 Physics for the Inquiring Mind: The Methods, Nature, and Philosophy of
Physical Science (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press)
Mazur E, Crouch C H, Pedigo D, Dourmashkin P A and Bieniek R J 2015 Principles & Practice
of Physics (San Francisco, CA: Pearson)

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 Leonhard Euler’s Letters to a German Princess

The Letters and Euler

Bodenmann S 2010 The 18th-century battle over lunar motion Phys. Today 63 27–32
Bogolyubov N N, Mikhailov G K and Yushkevich A P (ed) 1988 Euler and Modern Science trans.
from Russian by Robert Burns (Washington, DC: Mathematical Association of America) A
collection of twenty-seven papers from a conference on ‘The Development of Euler’s Ideas in
the Modern Era’ held in 1983.
Bradley R E and Sandifer C E (ed) 2007a Leonhard Euler: Life, Work, and Legacy. Elsevier
Studies in the History and Philosophy of Mathematics vol 5 (New York: Elsevier)
Bradley R E, Lawrence A D and Sandifer C E (ed) 2007b Euler at 300: An Appreciation
(Washington, DC: Mathematical Association of America)
Calinger R S 1975 Euler’s Letters to a German Princess as an expression of his mature scientific
outlook Arch. History Exact Sci. 15 211–33
Calinger R S 2007 Leonhard Euler: life and thought Leonhard Euler: Life, Work, and Legacy ed
R E Bradley and C Edward Sandifer pp 5–69
Calinger R S 2008 ‘Prologue’ to Louis-Gustave Du Pasquier Léonard Euler et ses amis (Leonhard
Euler and His Friends) trans. John S. D. Glaus
Calinger R S 2016 Leonhard Euler: Mathematical Genius in the Enlightenment (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press)
Calinger R S and Polyakhova E N 2007 Princess Dashkova, Euler, and the Russian Academy of
sciences Leonhard Euler: Life, Work and Legacy ed R E Bradley and C E Sandifer
(Amsterdam: Elsevier)
Dashkova E 1995 The Memoirs of Princess Dashkova: Russia in the Time of Catherine the Great
trans. ed K Fitzlyon (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press)
De Clercq P 2002 Scientific instruments from Holland for Tsar Peter the Great and the Academy
of Sciences in St. Petersburg Proc. of the XVIII Scientific Instruments Symposium (Moscow)
pp 12–26
Dibner B 1977 Benjamin Franklin Lightning (Physics of Lightning vol 1) (New York: Academic) p 23
Dvoichenko-Markoff E 1947 Benjamin Franklin, the American Philosophical Society and
Russian Academy of Sciences Proc. Am. Philos. Soc. 91 250–7
Dvoichenko-Markoff E 1950 The American Philosophical Society and early Russian-American
Relations Proc. Am. Philos. Soc. 94 549–600
Euler L 1859 Lettres a une Princesse d’Allemagne T. 1, 2, 3 (in two books) Leonhardi Euleri
Opera Omnia Ser. III, vols 11, 12 ed A Speiser (Paris: Charpentier) (III.11.OO; III.12.OO, in
French).
Euler L 1840 Letters of Euler on Different Subjects in Natural Philosophy Addressed to a German
Princess transl. from French ed D Brewster (New York: Harper) in 2 books
Euler L 2002 Lettres a une Princesse d’Allemagne sur diverse sujets de Physique et de Pilosophie
(Euler, Leonhard. Pis’ma k odnoi nemetskoy Prinzesse….) in Russian. Trans. from Russian
edition of 1768–72 from French to Russian and ed Yu H Kopelevich, N I Nevskaya, E P
Ojigova, Ya A Smorodinsky et al (St. Petersburg: Nauka) 720 p. (Ser.: ‘Classics of Science’.
Ed. by Russian Academy of Sciences).
Fasanelli F 2007 Images of Euler Leonhard Euler: Life, Work, and Legacy ed R E Bradley and
C Edward Sandifer (Amsterdam: Elsevier)
Fellmann E A 2007 Leonhard Euler (Basel: Birkhäuser). Trans. Erika and Walter Gautschi
Glaus J S D 2008 Leonhard Euler and His Friends (a translation of DuPasquier’s 1927 biography
of Euler et ses amis)

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Grigor’ian A T and Kirsanov V S 2007 Letters to a German Princess and Euler’s Physics. Transl.
from Russian Euler and Mathematical Sciences. Leonhard Euler 300-Anniversary ed N N
Bogolyubov, G K Mikhailov and A P Yushkevich (Washington, DC: Mathematical
Association of America) pp 307–17
Henry P 2007 Leonhard Euler Incomparable Géomètre (Geneve: Université de Genève)
Howse D 1980 Greenwich Time and the Discovery of the Longitude (Oxford: Oxford University
Press)
Klyve D 2011 Euler as master teacher in Letters to a German Princess Opusculum 2 17–8 and The
omnipresent savant Opusculum 3 23–5.
Kopelevich J 2002 History of the creation of ‘Letters’ and their addressees Leonard Euler:
Letters… (exec ed) N Nevskaya, pp 535–54 (in Russian)
Lacayo R and Benjamin F 2010 An Illustrated History of His Life and Times (New York: Time
Home Entertainment Inc)
Mattmuller M 2008 The First Modern Mathematician? Euler’s Influence on the Development of
Scientific Style Leonard Eȉler: K 300-letiiu so dnia rozhdenia/Leonhard Euler: 300th
Anniversary ; Vasilyev V N 37–50
McCarthy J J 1985 Physics in American Colleges before 1750 Physics History from AAPT-
Journals ed M N Phillips (Maryland, MD: AAPT) pp 163–7
Menshutkin B N 1952 Russia’s Lomonosov: Chemist, Courtier, Physicist, Poet (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press)
Musielak D 2014 Euler and the German Princess arXiv preprint (arXiv:1406.7417)
Nevskaya N et al (executive editor) 2002 Léonard Euler: Letters to a German Princess about
Various Physical and Philosophical Matters (in Russian) (Series: Russian Academy of
Sciences ‘Classics of Science’) (St. Petersburg, Russia: Nauka Publishing House) 720 pp.
(Letters 1–234 are on pp 7–530)
Nevskaya N I and Kholshevnikov K V 2007 Euler and the evolution of celestial mechanics
Leonhard Euler - 300 Anniversary ed N N Bogolyubov, G K Mikhailov and A P Yuskevich
(Washington, DC: Mathematical Association of America) 245–63 Trans. Robert Burns
Pasquier L-G D 1927 2008 Lèonard Euler et ses amis (Paris: Hermann) trans. as Leonhard Euler
and His Friends, by John S D Glaus, privately published, available through Amazon.com.
Prince S A et al 2006 The princess & the patriot: Ekaterina Dashkova, Benjamin Franklin, and the
age of enlightenment Trans. Am. Philos. Soc. 96 1–129
Richeson D S 2008 Euler’s Gem (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press)
Sandifer C E 2007 How Euler Did It (Washington, DC: Mathematical Association of America)
Thiele R 2005 Leonhard Euler (1707–1783) Mathematics and the Divine: A Historical Study
ed T Koetsier and L Bergmans (Amsterdam: Elsevier) pp 511–21
Vasilyev V N (ed) 2008 Leonard Eȉler: K 300-letiiu so dnia rozhdenii/Leonhard Euler: 300th
Anniversary (St. Petersburg: Nestor-Historia)
Wilford J N 2006 ‘Russian Princess Stands With Franklin as Comrade of the Enlightenment’
New York Times (March 14, 2006)
Winter E (ed) 1957 Die Registres der Berliner Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1746–1766 (Berlin:
Akademie)
Woronzoff-Dashkov A I 2008 Dashkova: A Life of Influence and Exile (Philadelphia, PA:
American Philosophical Society)

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 IOP Concise Physics

Leonhard Euler’s Letters to a German Princess

A milestone in the history of physics textbooks and more
Ronald S Calinger, Ekaterina (Katya) Denisova and Elena N Polyakhova

Chapter 8
Glossary of principal names

Bernoulli, Daniel (Gröningen, Netherlands Swiss natural philosopher, mathematician,

1-29-1700–3-17-1782 Basel, Switz) and physician, faculty at the University of
Basel, author of Hydrodynamica (1738),
became Euler’s best friend, Member of the
Petersburg Academy, the Berlin Academy,
the Paris Academy, and FRS.

Brahe, Tycho (Knutstorp Castle, Sweden 12- Danish astronomer.

14-1546–10-24-1601 Prague, Imperial
Austria)

Brewster, David (Jedburgh, Scotland 12-11- Scottish physicist, inventor, writer, and aca-
1781–2-10-1868 Allerly, Melrose, Scotland) demic, Scottish Templar, FRS.

Condorcet, Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de French aristocrat, philosopher, mathemati-

Caritat, Marquis de (Ribemont, France 9-17- cian, and official of the Paris Academy of
1743–3-29-1794 Bourg-la-Reine, France) Sciences. He worked with Euler and Benjamin
Franklin. In his final years, he wrote Esquisse
d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit
humain (Sketch for a Historical Picture of
the Progress of the Human Mind) published
posthumously in 1795.

D’Alembert, Jean-Baptiste le Rond (Paris, French mathematician, natural philosopher,

France 11-17-1717–10-29-1783 Paris) philosopher, and music theorist, corre-
sponded with Euler on mathematics, science
co-editor of the Encyclopédie, Member of the
Paris Academy, HM of the Berlin Academy,
FM of the Petersburg Academy and FRS.

Delisle, Jean Nicholas (Paris 4 April 1688– French astronomer and cartographer. He went
11 September 1768, Paris) to St. Petersburg to the new astronomical

doi:10.1088/2053-2571/aae6d2ch8 8-1 ª Morgan & Claypool Publishers 2019

 Leonhard Euler’s Letters to a German Princess

institute and science academy in 1725. He

remained there for most of the next twenty-
two years. He trained Leonhard Euler and the
first generation of Russian astronomers. He
participated in the expedition to Siberia
(Kamchatka), but clouds blocked him. In
1747 he returned to Paris and was appointed
geographic astronomer to the navy depart-
ment. In 1761 he organized the study on a
global scale of the transit of Venus.

Desagulier, John Theophilus (New While born in France, he became a British

Rochelle, France 12 March 1683–29 natural philosopher, Anglican cleric, engineer,
February 1744, London) and Freemason. He studied at Oxford, where
he attended the lectures and demonstrations of
John Keill. In 1714 Isaac Newton invited
Desagulier to be his experimental assistant at
the weekly meetings of the Royal Society,
which elected him a fellow that year.
Desagulier popularized Newtonian science
and demonstrated their practical applications.
He was ordained an Anglican priest in 1717 in
London. He gave public lectures on mechan-
ics, hydrostatics, pneumatics, optics, and
astronomy. He received the Royal Society’s
Copley Medal in 1734 for his work with
Stephen Gray on electricity.

Diderot, Denis (Langres, France 5-10-1713– French philosopher, art critic, and writer, chief
31-7-1784 Paris) editor of the multi-volume Encyclopédie,
prominent Enlightenment figure.

Fontenelle, Bernard Le Bovier de (Rouen, French writer, philosopher, and man of let-
France 2-11-1657–1-9-1757 Paris, France) ters, member of the French and Paris
Academies, wrote Entretiens sur la pluralité
de mondes (1686), defender of the new
Cartesian natural philosophy.

Formey, Jean-Henri Samuel (Berlin, 31-5- German Calvinist minister and writer, minister
1711–7-3-1791 Berlin) at the church that Euler attended, perpetual
secretary of the Berlin Academy, popularized
Wolffian philosophy, critic of Rousseau.

Franklin, Benjamin (Boston 17 January American writer, diplomat, natural philoso-

1706–17 April 1790 Philadelphia) pher, polymath, and satirist. He was a leading
author and printer in Philadelphia and a signer
of the United States’ Declaration of
Independence. Franklin was the first postmas-
ter general of the United States and ambassa-
dor to France. He conducted important

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 Leonhard Euler’s Letters to a German Princess

research on electricity, including his famous

kite experiment, and wrote Experiments and
Observations on Electricity (1751). Franklin
founded the American Philosophical Society
in Philadelphia and was its first president. He
was also a founder of the University of
Pennsylvania. He was a foreign member of
the Royal Society of London (FRS) 1756–,
and the Petersburg Academy, 1789–.

Frederick II, the Great (Berlin, Prussia 1-24- Prussian monarch, advocated the reorganiza-
1712–8-17-1786, Sanssouci, Potsdam, tion and expansion of the Berlin Academy
Prussia, reigned 1740–86) and its Observatory, 1744. He stressed the
primacy of the state. Expanded Prussian
territory, supported religious toleration.
Frederike Charlotte Leopoldine Ludovica German princess of ‘royal blood’, studied
Louise (Schwedt, Prussia 8-18-1745–1-23-1808 Euler’s Letters to a German Princess,
Altona, today part of Hamburg, Germany) Abbess of Herford Abbey, 1764–1802.

Fuss, Nicolas (Basel, Switz. 29-1-1755–4-1- Swiss mathematician, secretary recruited

1826 St. Petersburg, Russia) from Basel and collaborator to Euler, leader
of Euler circle.

Gassendi, Pierre (Champtercier, France French philosopher, priest, scientific observer,

1-22-1592–10-24-1655 Paris) defender of new empiricism and physics, and
skeptic. He attempted to make Epicurean
atomism acceptable to Christianity.

Hunter, Henry (Culross, Scotland 25-8- Scottish minister, translator of Euler’s

1741–27-10-1802 Bristol, England) Letters to a German Princess.

Lacroix, Sylvestre François (Paris 28-4- French mathematician, member of the Paris
1765–24-5-1843 Paris) Academy, 1789, and the Institut National of
the Sciences, 1799–, author of a textbook on
differential and integral calculus, 1797–98.

Lagrange, Joseph Louis, born Giuseppe Italian-born mathematician and astronomer.

Luigi (Turin, Italy 25 January 1736–10 Lagrange taught at the Royal Military
April 1813 Paris) Academy in Turin and founded the Turin
Academy of Sciences in 1758. He moved to
the Berlin Academy in 1766 and the Paris
Academy in 1786. He was made a professor of
mathematics at the new École polytechnique
in 1794. Lagrange made significant contribu-
tions to both classical and celestial mechanics,
generalizing the results of Euler and
Maupertuis. He wrote Mécanique analytique
in 1788. He worked on developing satisfactory
foundations for calculus. He was considered
‘the successor to Euler’.

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 Leonhard Euler’s Letters to a German Princess

Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm (Leipzig, German philosopher, logician, mathematician,

Germany 1 July 1646–14 November 1716 natural philosopher, metaphysician, and histor-
Hanover, Germany) ian who made substantial contributions to each.
He was the next great figure in rationalism after
Descartes. He received a law degree in 1667
from Altdorf. Leibniz served Baron von
Boyneburg from 1667, as the librarian and
councillor to the Duke of Hanover from 1678,
historian to the House of Brunswick from 1685,
and librarian at Wolfenbuettel from 1691. He
proposed the Berlin Society of the Sciences in
1700, and Peter the Great consulted him on
creating the Petersburg Academy. Independent
of Newton, Leibniz invented an early stage of
calculus. He formulated a new dynamism with
the conservation of vis viva, roughly kinetic
energy, as central. The ultimate substance in
his universe were monads, geometric points of
energy. The monads were windowless, so a pre-
established harmony was needed for connec-
tions between the body and mind. Leibniz’s
rational method was based on contradiction
and the principle of sufficient reason.

Leopold (III) Friedrich Franz, (Furst) Prince of Known as ‘Father Franz’.

Anhalt-Dessau (Dessau, Germany 10-8-1740–
9-8-1817 Lisium in Oranien-Wörlitz, Germany)

Lexell, Anders Johan (Turku, Finland 12-24 Finnish-Swedish mathematician, natural phi-
(11-30 O.S.)1740–[11-30, O.S.]12-11-1784 losopher, and astronomer, Euler’s successor
St. Petersburg, Russia) at the Petersburg Academy.

Lomonosov, Mikhail Vasilyevich (near Russian polymath, scientist, chemist, physicist,

Kholinogory close to the White Sea, Russia mineralogist, historian, linguistic reformer,
19 November [Nov. 8 o.s.] 1711–15 April poet, and historian. He studied under Wolff at
[April 4 o.s.] 1765 St. Petersburg) Marburg and closely followed his experiments.
Lomonosov opposed the phlogiston theory in
chemistry and laid the foundations of physical
chemistry. He was named professor of chem-
istry in 1745 at the Petersburg Academy. He
organized its chemical laboratory and collected
plants, minerals, and ores from all over Russia.
Lomonosov proposed the founding of Moscow
State University in 1754.

Louise Henriette Wilhelmine (Stolzenberg, German princess, spouse of Leopold III of

today Rozanki, Poland 9-24-1750–12-21- Anhalt-Dessau, artistically gifted.
1811 Dessau, Germany)

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 Leonhard Euler’s Letters to a German Princess

Maupertuis, Pierre Louis Moraeau de (Saint French mathematician, philosopher, and man
Malo, France 28 September 1698–27 July of letters. Director of the Paris Academy,
1759 Basel, Swiss Confederation) 1742–44, President of the Berlin Academy,
1746–57. He led the Lapland Expedition to
measure an arc of meridian to help determine
the shape of Earth that supported the
Newtonian view, 1736–7, and set forth the
principle of least action, 1741–6, now known
as the Euler–Maupertuis principle. He claimed
priority but this was opposed based on a lost
letter by Leibniz that provoked a bitter scien-
tific-literary controversy centered at the Berlin
Academy. Frederick II supported Maupertuis,
and so did Euler, who deserved priority.

Musschenbroek, Pieter van (Leiden, Dutch physicist and mathematician. He was

Netherlands 14 March 1692–19 September a professor of mathematics,the sciences,
1761 Leiden) astronomy, and medicine at the universities
of Duiberg, 1719–23, Utrecht, 1723–40, and
Leiden, 1740–61. He invented the Leiden jar,
the first capacitor that stored electrical
charge, and investigated the buckling of
struts. He wrote Elementa physica (1726)
and Institutiones physicae (1734). He was
elected a foreign member of the Fellows of
the Royal Society (FRS) and of the Paris
Academy, 1734. He was also a foreign mem-
ber of the Berlin Academy and an honorary
professor at the Petersburg Academy.

Newton, Isaac (Woolsthorpe Manor, English physicist, mathematician, astronomer,

England 1-4-1643–3-31-1727 Kensington, alchemist, and theologian. Author of Principia
London, England) mathematica (1687) and Opticks (1704), inven-
tor of the method of fluxions, an early stage of
calculus, Fellow and President of the Royal
Society (FRS) in London.

Rohault, Jacques (Amiens, France ca. 1618– French philosopher, natural philosopher, and
12-27-1672 Paris) mathematician, Cartesian, supported mechani-
cal philosophy, wrote Traite de physique (1671).

Rumovskij, Stepan (Vladimir, Russia 10-29- Russian astronomer and student of Euler,
1734–7-6-1812 St. Petersburg, Russia) had difficulties with older colleague Lexell.

Thümmig, Ludwig Philipp (Helmbrechts 12 German philosopher and early Wolffian.

May 1697–15 April 1728 Kassel) Adjunct at the University of Halle, where
he mainly taught mathematics and natural
philosophy, ordinary professor of philosophy
at Halle, 1717–23, ordinary professor of
philosophy and mathematics at Collegium

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 Leonhard Euler’s Letters to a German Princess

Carolinum in Kassel, 1724–8. He simplified

Wolffian physics in his Physicae Institutiones
Philosophia Wolffianae and made it more
understandable.

Arouet, François-Marie, known by his nom One of the greatest French writers. He was a
de plume, Voltaire (Paris 21 November leader and a historian of the French
1694–30 May1778 Paris) Enlightenment. Voltaire opposed tyranny,
bigotry, and cruelty by governments and
churches. He was famous for his wit and satire.
He supported and popularized the science of
Newton. He interacted with Frederick the
Great and criticized Maupertuis. Two of his
books are Lettres philosophiques (on the
English) (1734), and Siècle de Louis XIV (1751).

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