{"id":10207,"date":"2018-06-15T16:28:35","date_gmt":"2018-06-15T16:28:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/?p=10207"},"modified":"2018-06-18T17:59:26","modified_gmt":"2018-06-18T17:59:26","slug":"a-mathematical-friendship-leonhard-euler-and-christian-goldbach","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/?p=10207","title":{"rendered":"A mathematical friendship: Leonhard Euler and Christian Goldbach"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

Leonhard Euler, by Jakob Emanuel Handmann. c. 1756. (Deutsches Museum, Munich; source of image, Wikimedia Commons).<\/p><\/div>\n

It is a pleasure and privilege to announce publication in EMLO of the first instalment of the correspondence of Leonhard Euler (1707\u20131783)<\/a>. Working in partnership with scholars at the Bernoulli-Euler-Zentrum [BEZ]<\/a>\u00a0in Basel, EMLO has prepared and uploaded metadata for Euler\u2019s correspondence with Christian Goldbach (1690\u20131764)<\/a>, an exchange that extends across almost four decades and reveals the depth of the long-standing friendship which developed between the two men. When Euler arrived at the Russian Academy of Sciences at the age of just twenty, the Academy’s president Goldbach offered advice and support, and in the fullness of time stood as godfather to the younger mathematician’s eldest son,\u00a0Johann Albrecht Euler (1734\u20131800)<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The volume from which this inventory is drawn, was published in 2015 by Springer<\/a> as part of the series of Euler\u2019s Opera Omnia<\/em><\/a>.[1. Commercium cum Christiano Goldbach \/ Correspondence with Christian Goldbach<\/em> (2 parts), ed. Franz Lemmermeyer and Martin Mattm\u00fcller (Springer, 2015).]\u00a0Edited by Franz Lemmermeyer and Martin Mattm\u00fcller, these letters\u00a0\u2014 198 in total, including two from young Johann Albrecht to his godfather \u2014 provide a fascinating overview of eighteenth-century number theory, its sources, and its repercussions, and they offer today’s historians a fascinating insight\u00a0into scholarly circles in St Petersburg and Berlin in the middle of the eighteenth century.<\/p>\n

As Martin Mattm\u00fcller explains in his introduction to EMLO’s catalogue<\/a>, at the instigation of Ferdinand Rudio, then professor of mathematics at the Z\u00fcrich Polytechnic, the Schweizerische Naturforschende Gesellschaft (now the Swiss Academy of Science [SCNAT]) set up\u00a0a committee in 1907 \u2014 the Euler-Kommission<\/a> \u2014 to plan, to fund, and to realize the ambitious undertaking of creating an edition of Euler’s collected works.\u00a0In 1967, the spotlight\u00a0widened from a focus on the mathematician’s published works to encompass Euler’s correspondence, the largest part of which is held today in the care of the Soviet Academy of Science, and a partnership was forged between the Swiss and Soviet Academies. Since 1980, six volumes of correspondence have appeared. In the course of this editorial work, new letters have been added and many corrections made to the initial inventory. The volume containing the exchange between Euler and Goldbach\u00a0is the most recent in the series.<\/p>\n

\"\"The records of the Euler-Goldbach letters in EMLO provide links to texts that have just been released the new virtual research environment platform (currently in beta) under development in Basel:\u00a0Bernoulli-Euler Online [BEOL]<\/a>. At present the\u00a0the Euler-Kommission is working towards\u00a0making available\u00a0all of the printed and manuscript material in this\u00a0web-based virtual research environment with the aim of ensuring that the\u00a0task which the mathematical community undertook at the beginning of the twentieth century is brought to a conclusion for \u2014 in\u00a0Martin\u00a0Mattm\u00fcller’s words\u00a0\u2014 the\u00a0‘benefit of twenty-first century mathematicians and historians of science as a monument to the lasting glory of Leonhard Euler’. Theirs is a laudable enterprise that holds right at its heart the aspirations of the international scholarly community. Metadata for further volumes will be uploaded into EMLO over the course of this year and, in the meantime, we invite you to follow these invaluable links and explore all that, even at this early stage, the\u00a0Bernoulli-Euler Online<\/a>\u00a0platform has to offer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It is a pleasure and privilege to announce publication in EMLO of the first instalment of the correspondence of Leonhard Euler (1707\u20131783). Working in partnership with scholars at the Bernoulli-Euler-Zentrum [BEZ]\u00a0in Basel, EMLO has prepared and uploaded metadata for Euler\u2019s correspondence with Christian Goldbach (1690\u20131764), an exchange that extends across almost four decades and reveals […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10207","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10207","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10207"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10207\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10207"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10207"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10207"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}