Euler as an Educator

Abstract

While many people know Euler's great textbooks on algebra and the differential calculus, and his renowned Letters to a German Princess, they may not be so familiar with his arithmetic text, or his texts relating to the instruction of the navy and the military, or indeed his proposal for the restructuring of the Gymnasium (preparatory school) in St Petersburg. These texts comprise a fraction of Euler's prodigious output but taken together they show the breadth of Euler's interest in education, an interest that stretched across a variety of subjects and a variety of students. This article is based on a talk given at the BSHM Euler anniversary meeting in July 2007.

Notes

¹ I am grateful to Reinhard Siegmund-Schultze for helping me with the translation of this article.

² The Cologne pound was the one used for weighing silver and gold throughout the German states, irrespective of location, and so was already a standard in a certain sense.

³ The whereabouts of Euler's own copies of the letters is unknown. They were possibly lost when Euler's house in St Petersburg was destroyed by fire in 1771. I am grateful to Rüdiger Thiele for information about the various editions of the Letters.

⁴ Princess Sophie Friederike Charlotte Leopoldine von Brandenburg-Schwedt (1745–1808). The Princess later became an abbess in a cloister in which one of her predecessors had had a correspondence with Descartes.

⁵ http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/printmember/tel0int-1

⁶ Bernoulli's Hydrodynamica was not published until 1738 by which time he had left St Petersburg and gone to Basel but he left a draft of the text in St Petersburg when he departed from there in 1733.

⁷ The Russian Academy of Sciences was founded by Peter the Great, in 1724, but he died before the Academy was officially opened in 1725. He was succeeded by his wife Catherine I who continued to support the Academy. In 1727 she was succeeded by Peter II, the grandson of Peter the Great, who had little interest in the Academy. His reign lasted only until 1730 when he was succeeded by Ann I, under whom the Academy's future was assured.