QQC 6

Euler

“Leonhard Euler was Switzerland's foremost scientist and one of the three greatest mathematicians of modern times (the other two being Gauss and Riemann).”

I'm confused. When did this guy live?  

“The French Physicist Arago, in speaking of Euler’s incomparable mathematical facility, remarked that “He calculated without apparent effort, as men breathe, or as eagles sustain themselves in the wind.”

I wish I had that skill. He sounds like a calculator. He's a luck y 'un. 

“He suffered total blindness during the last 17 years of his life, but with the aid of his powerful memory and fertile imagination, and with helpers to write his books and scientific papers from dictation, he actually increased his already prodigious output of work.”

That is some serious dedication to math. I don't think I could go blind and survive. Euler is like superman or somethin'. Clark Kent. Super strong and a nerd at the same time! Perish the thought!

“His business was mathematical research, and he new his business. He was also a man of broad culture, well versed in the classical languages and literatures (he knew the Aeneid by heart), many modern languages, physiology, medicine, botany, geography, and the entire body of physical science as it was known in his time. However, he had little talent for metaphysics or disputation, and came out second best in many good-natured verbal encounters with Voltaire at the court of Frederick the Great.”

Glad to know he isn't just one big ball of what students would want on their college applications. But seriously. That is some range. Did he have any successors? 

“His personal life was as placid and uneventful as is possible for a man with 13 children.” 

I can't imagine his home life. "Quiet down children! I'm proving the law of sines!" "Uhhh! Dad! Math again!?" I feel sorry for his wife. They didn't have the conveniences of modern medicine back then.

SO he created e? If not for Euler, kids everywhere wouldn't be groaning about math class...

It must of sucked writing all that with a quill and ink. Just think! No erasers. It makes me shudder. 

"Euler was the Shakespeare of mathematics - universal, richly detailed, and inexhaustible."

QQC 5

Leibniz


"He made memorable creative contributions across the entire spectrum of intellectual life, from mathematics and logic through the various sciences to history, law, diplomacy, politics, philology, metaphysics, and theology. No one thinker except Aristotle has rivaled him in the range and variety of his abilities and achievements.”

If Leibniz was so varied why don’t we hear of him more often? Why is he not one of the great philosophers that get their picture on google on his birthday? When is his birthday?

All I think of when I hear Leibniz is Newton’s extraordinary vengeance. How he pursued his rival past the grave when trying to destroy his achievements.

“He acquired a love of history from his father, and he spent most of his childhood eagerly devouring the large library of choice that his father had collected, including Herodotus, Xenophon, Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian, Seneca, Pliny, Polybius, and many others.”

How could he read those? How come every great philosopher or whatever is a magical genius from birth? Dang, those are still hard to understand even for adults so how could him as a child read all those just for fun? Its hard to believe.

“At that time the University was firmly congealed in the sterile Aristotelian tradition and did nothing to encourage science.”

Benjamin Franklin used to steal bodies for science so beneath his house they found a virtual cornucopia of bones.

“Leibniz spent the next year in Nuremberg, which was then a center of the secret mystical order of the Rosicrucians, and he made himself so familiar with the ideas and writings of the alchemists - much as Newton was doing at Cambridge - that he was elected secretary of the local Rosicrucian society.”

This also reminds me of Benjamin Franklin. Its rumored that he was a part of a secret sex society.

“The most important of these goals was survival, for at that time the swollen arrogance of Louis XIV was like a boil on the face of Europe, and his armies were threatening the Low Countries and the small German states around the Rhine.”

Gotta pop a boil. It seems Germany is a popular country. 

“Western Europe was drunk with the wine of reason, and Leibniz enthusiastically joined the party when he moved to Paris at the age of 26.”

I believe we think 26 is young but at that time maybe you would only live to 60. 

I wonder if he ever had a girlfriend...