 |
| Euler, mathematician par excellence |
In spite of what people say, I am not a mathematician. This is evident in that I can't play a decent game of chess. I enjoyed and excelled at O and A level maths but became unstuck at college level with divs and
curls and wot-not. And so I cannot eulogise over Euler as befits him. A
statement attributed to Pierre-Simon Laplace, another master in mathematics, expresses Euler's influence on mathematics: "Read Euler, read Euler, he is the master of us all."
But I do remember my fascination on meeting Euler's famous
formula for the first time in
PSS days
which brought together so many threads in the
A level maths syllabus - convergent series, imaginary numbers, trigonometry, logarithms and exponentials - just as the diverse characters are in the last chapter of a crime novel. Substituting
pi for
x we have the identity shown in the bottom right of yesterday's Google doodle:
