Speaker
Description
Almost all of us, even unknowingly, use technological products based on Euler's mathematical applications every day or, in school education, have encountered his formulas and proofs. However, much of his initial inspirations came from the unexpected and illuminating naval experiences, pushed first by the Prussian monarch Frederick II and then by the Tsarina Catherine II, to improve their fleets.
In the autumn of 1778, at the age of seventy-one, now almost blind, Euler, highly esteemed and known throughout Europe, is rearranging and writing down his notes of about sixty years of work in the study of his home in St. Petersburg; helped by his son Karl Johan and his young nephew Nikolai Fuss, both mathematicians, he intends to leave an orderly memory of it, a “not ungrateful gift”, to use his words.
The great mathematician talks to us about these studies in the first person, through the Author, in the book "1778, Long nights in St. Petersburg" which intends to condense, in a way that adheres to his works and autobiography, some of his intuitions and scientific contributions and in particular to the naval and nautical design of the Enlightenment century, still relevant, initiated and consolidated by the experiences lived on eighteenth-century vessels.
