# Leonhard Euler place in mathematical history **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [January 7, 2016, 8:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/leonhard-euler-place-in-mathematical-history/742399 "2016-01-07T08:16:00Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![thanatic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/97f17d/32.png) [@thanatic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/thanatic)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2016, 8:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/leonhard-euler-place-in-mathematical-history/742399/1 "2016-01-07T08:16:00Z")
mathematicians love to rate Euler as one of the greatest of all time, but how he was a Christian, he believed in a God? ---
**Author:** ![One\_And\_Only\_Wanderers](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/838e76/32.png) [@One\_And\_Only\_Wanderers](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/One_And_Only_Wanderers)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2016, 8:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/leonhard-euler-place-in-mathematical-history/742399/2 "2016-01-07T08:16:42Z")
Just a guess, but probably because he was spankingly good at Math. ---
**Author:** ![thanatic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/97f17d/32.png) [@thanatic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/thanatic)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2016, 8:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/leonhard-euler-place-in-mathematical-history/742399/3 "2016-01-07T08:20:41Z")
> [@One\_And\_Only\_Wanderers](#): > > Just a guess, but probably because he was spankingly good at Math. but can’t we question that his christian beliefs might of influenced his math? ---
**Author:** ![One\_And\_Only\_Wanderers](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/838e76/32.png) [@One\_And\_Only\_Wanderers](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/One_And_Only_Wanderers)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2016, 8:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/leonhard-euler-place-in-mathematical-history/742399/4 "2016-01-07T08:52:07Z")
> [@thanatic](#): > > but can’t we question that his christian beliefs might of influenced his math? How? Where’s the crossover? A rigorous mathematical proof is valid whether you believe the universe was created by a god or gods or whether you’re an atheist. ---
**Author:** ![penultima\_thule](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/penultima_thule/32/3833_2.png) [@penultima\_thule](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/penultima_thule)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2016, 8:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/leonhard-euler-place-in-mathematical-history/742399/5 "2016-01-07T08:54:47Z")
> [@thanatic](#): > > but can’t we question that his christian beliefs might of influenced his math? Sure, were his mathematical formulas had been presented as verified by faith rather than proofs. ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2016, 10:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/leonhard-euler-place-in-mathematical-history/742399/6 "2016-01-07T10:48:08Z")
thanatic, you’ve started a lot of threads where you want to know who the top n members of x profession are or were. I’m not saying that you don’t have the right to start such threads, but you’ve got to understand that these are minor side issues for most members of these professions. Yes, Euler is generally considered one of the best mathematicians of all time, but that doesn’t mean that most mathematicians know much about him. Most mathematicians don’t even have a good grasp on the range of theorems he proved. Most mathematicians have never given a thought to what his religious beliefs are. Once a theorem is proved, it becomes part of the structure of mathematical thought and the question of who proved it, let alone what that person’s religious beliefs were, just isn’t relevant to its mathematical truth in the view of most mathematicians. ---
**Author:** ![WordMan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/e8c25b/32.png) [@WordMan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/WordMan)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2016, 2:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/leonhard-euler-place-in-mathematical-history/742399/7 "2016-01-07T14:34:03Z")
> [@Wendell\_Wagner](#): > > thanatic, you’ve started a lot of threads where you want to know who the top n members of x profession are or were. I’m not saying that you don’t have the right to start such threads, but you’ve got to understand that these are minor side issues for most members of these professions. Yes, Euler is generally considered one of the best mathematicians of all time, but that doesn’t mean that most mathematicians know much about him. Most mathematicians don’t even have a good grasp on the range of theorems he proved. Most mathematicians have never given a thought to what his religious beliefs are. Once a theorem is proved, it becomes part of the structure of mathematical thought and the question of who proved it, let alone what that person’s religious beliefs were, just isn’t relevant to its mathematical truth in the view of most mathematicians. Well stated on all fronts. Thank you. ETA: to further the point that there is a difference between what is proven mathematically and other aspects of a mathematician’s life, look at Leibniz. He is held up to this day as a brilliant, field-creating (with Newton) genius. But his philosophical “Best of All Worlds” concept was widely mocked - as Dr. Pangloss in Voltaire’s Candide - then, and to this day. ---
**Author:** ![John\_Mace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_mace/32/185_2.png) [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2016, 2:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/leonhard-euler-place-in-mathematical-history/742399/8 "2016-01-07T14:40:23Z")
Yeah, and what’s so great about Newton anyway? He believed in and practiced alchemy, so I’m starting to look a little askance at that whole F=ma thing. And Calculus? It’s probably based on some sort of philosopher’s stone or something! ---
**Author:** ![Thudlow\_Boink](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thudlow_boink/32/320_2.png) [@Thudlow\_Boink](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Thudlow_Boink)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2016, 5:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/leonhard-euler-place-in-mathematical-history/742399/9 "2016-01-07T17:37:23Z")
> [@thanatic](#): > > mathematicians love to rate Euler as one of the greatest of all time, but how Look at this [List of things named after Leonhard Euler](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_things_named_after_Leonhard_Euler). Then take a look at this video, [A Tribute to Euler](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEWj93XjON0), by William Dunham, who is a wonderful writer and speaker on mathematics, author of such books as _Journey through Genius: The Great Theorems of Mathematics_ and _Euler: The Master of Us All_. > [@](#): > > he was a Christian, he believed in a God? Yes, according to [everything I’ve read about him](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonhard_Euler#Personal_philosophy_and_religious_beliefs). Some people claim the three greatest mathematicians ever were Archimedes, Newton, and Gauss. I’m inclined to believe that Euler was their equal. Or at least, Euler is to mathematics as Joseph Haydn is to music: maybe not one of the Big Three, but certainly great and influential and prolific and from what I’ve heard a pretty decent, down-to-earth human being. ---
**Author:** ![septimus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/septimus/32/410_2.png) [@septimus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/septimus)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2016, 5:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/leonhard-euler-place-in-mathematical-history/742399/10 "2016-01-07T17:38:12Z")
> [@WordMan](#): > > … to further the point that there is a difference between what is proven mathematically and other aspects of a mathematician’s life, look at Leibniz. He is held up to this day as a brilliant, field-creating (with Newton) genius. But his philosophical “Best of All Worlds” concept was widely mocked - as Dr. Pangloss in Voltaire’s Candide - then, and to this day. Leibniz was an extremely brilliant man who pioneered very many fields. His insights into mathematics and physics have been cited by important 20th-century thinkers. The _Best of all Possible Worlds_ concept even echoes today in the notion that we inhabit a Goldilocks zone in a multiverse. (And even without that connection, Leibniz’ teleology makes more sense than most origanized religions.) ---
**Author:** ![Thudlow\_Boink](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thudlow_boink/32/320_2.png) [@Thudlow\_Boink](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Thudlow_Boink)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2016, 5:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/leonhard-euler-place-in-mathematical-history/742399/11 "2016-01-07T17:48:58Z")
> [@WordMan](#): > > ETA: to further the point that there is a difference between what is proven mathematically and other aspects of a mathematician’s life, look at Leibniz. He is held up to this day as a brilliant, field-creating (with Newton) genius. But his philosophical “Best of All Worlds” concept was widely mocked - as Dr. Pangloss in Voltaire’s Candide - then, and to this day. He was indeed a genius, and it’s too bad he didn’t live in the age of computers; he would have understood them pretty well, I think. It’s certainly easy to mock a straw-man version of his “best of all possible worlds” claim, but maybe Leibniz’s own views deserve to be taken a little more seriously. I’ve found explanations online [here](http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl201/modules/Philosophers/Leibniz/leibniz.html), [here](http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/leibniz-evil/), and [here](http://www.iep.utm.edu/leib-met/#SH6b). From the second cite: > [@](#): > > One might think that declaring this world to be the best possible world does not constitute a valid response to the underachiever problem. Indeed, such a response might be taken to provide the basis for a new underachiever argument along the following lines: > > (1) If God were all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good, then this world would be the best possible world. > (2) But surely this world is not the best possible world. > (3) Thus, God is not all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good. > > Leibniz believes, however, that there was overwhelming evidence that the conclusion of this argument was false. He therefore must take one of the two premises in this argument to be false. Given that he himself is committed to the first premise, he must reject the second premise. And this is precisely what he does. > > What reason, Leibniz asks, does the critic have for thinking that (2) is true? When Leibniz addresses this issue, he usually has the critic say something along the following lines: > > _Surely this world is not the best possible world since we can easily conceive of possible worlds that are better. Take some token instance of suffering: the tragic bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building. Surely a world without that event would be better than the actual world. And there is no reason why God couldn’t have created the world without that event. Thus, this is not the best possible world. [See Theodicy 118–119 (H 188–191; G VI 168–172).]_ > > Leibniz’s response to this sort of criticism comes in two stages. First, Leibniz says that while we can think of certain token features of the world that in and of themselves might be better than they are, we do not know whether it is possible to create a better world lacking those features, because we can never be certain of the nature of the connections between the token events in question and other events in the world. If we could improve or eliminate the token event in question without otherwise changing the world, we might well have a better world. Unfortunately, we have no way of knowing whether such a change to the token event would leave the world otherwise unchanged, or might instead make things, on balance, worse. [See Theodicy 211–214 (H 260–2; G VI 244–7) and Gr, p.64f., for examples of this sort of response.] > > Second, examples such as these are deceptive because they presume that God utilizes standards of world goodness that he may not in fact use. For example, it may presume that a world is good only if each part taken in isolation is good (a standard, we have seen, that Leibniz rejects), or it might presume that a world is good only if human beings enjoy happiness in it. > > Leibniz argues in numerous texts that it is parochial to think that human happiness is the standard whereby the goodness of worlds is to be judged. A more reasonable standard, according to Leibniz, would be the happiness of all sentient beings. But once we admit this, it may turn out that the amount of unhappiness in the created realm is quite small, given that for all we know, the sentient beings on Earth might constitute a very small percentage of the sentient beings created by God. Here Leibniz includes not only preternatural beings such as angels, but also the possibility of extraterrestrial rational beings [Theodicy 19 (H 134–5; G VI 113–4)]. I don’t know what reputation Leibniz has among modern philosophers, but I don’t think he’s totally dismissed. ---
**Author:** ![WordMan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/e8c25b/32.png) [@WordMan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/WordMan)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2016, 5:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/leonhard-euler-place-in-mathematical-history/742399/12 "2016-01-07T17:53:01Z")
> [@septimus](#): > > Leibniz was an extremely brilliant man who pioneered very many fields. His insights into mathematics and physics have been cited by important 20th-century thinkers. > > The _Best of all Possible Worlds_ concept even echoes today in the notion that we inhabit a Goldilocks zone in a multiverse. (And even without that connection, Leibniz’ teleology makes more sense than most origanized religions.) All true. That doesn’t change the fact that “Panglossian” is an adjective in active use to this day and is defined as “blindly or naively optimistic”; and that Pangloss was specifically based on Leibniz. The dude got served by Voltaire. ---
**Author:** ![thanatic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/97f17d/32.png) [@thanatic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/thanatic)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2016, 6:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/leonhard-euler-place-in-mathematical-history/742399/13 "2016-01-07T18:17:57Z")
is it fair to say Leibniz was even smarter than Newton? ---
**Author:** ![Snarky\_Kong](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/a183cd/32.png) [@Snarky\_Kong](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Snarky_Kong)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2016, 6:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/leonhard-euler-place-in-mathematical-history/742399/14 "2016-01-07T18:33:53Z")
> [@Thudlow\_Boink](#): > > He was indeed a genius, and it’s too bad he didn’t live in the age of computers; he would have understood them pretty well, I think. > > It’s certainly easy to mock a straw-man version of his “best of all possible worlds” claim, but maybe Leibniz’s own views deserve to be taken a little more seriously. I’ve found explanations online [here](http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl201/modules/Philosophers/Leibniz/leibniz.html), [here](http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/leibniz-evil/), and [here](http://www.iep.utm.edu/leib-met/#SH6b). From the second cite:I don’t know what reputation Leibniz has among modern philosophers, but I don’t think he’s totally dismissed. I dunno, it seems trivial to dismiss both that arguments. “Maybe cancer isn’t actually bad because invisible beings that we don’t know exist might get some pleasure out of it” doesn’t seem very convincing. ---
**Author:** ![Telemark](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/telemark/32/372_2.png) [@Telemark](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Telemark)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2016, 6:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/leonhard-euler-place-in-mathematical-history/742399/15 "2016-01-07T18:37:51Z")
> [@thanatic](#): > > is it fair to say Leibniz was even smarter than Newton? As people have said in pretty much all of your threads on this subject, there’s really no way to evaluate relative intelligence between people in this manner. But Leibniz was a better dancer. ---
**Author:** ![WordMan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/e8c25b/32.png) [@WordMan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/WordMan)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2016, 6:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/leonhard-euler-place-in-mathematical-history/742399/16 "2016-01-07T18:39:42Z")
> [@thanatic](#): > > is it fair to say Leibniz was even smarter than Newton? Again, that is not the best way to approach how to consider them. They have an overlap in the shared achievement of the calculus, but each had huge achievements in other unrelated areas. It is like asking why Stradivarius makes the best violins. He didin’t; he is one of many great makers, including current makers, who at the very top of the craft. He’s been marketed the best. Both have history-making brilliance. Beyond that is fun silly disucssion. ---
**Author:** ![thanatic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/97f17d/32.png) [@thanatic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/thanatic)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2016, 6:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/leonhard-euler-place-in-mathematical-history/742399/17 "2016-01-07T18:56:38Z")
> [@WordMan](#): > > Again, that is not the best way to approach how to consider them. They have an overlap in the shared achievement of the calculus, but each had huge achievements in other unrelated areas. > > It is like asking why Stradivarius makes the best violins. He didin’t; he is one of many great makers, including current makers, who at the very top of the craft. He’s been marketed the best. > > Both have history-making brilliance. Beyond that is fun silly disucssion. one can say that Leibniz was a bigger polymath then Newton was lerned in much more diverse fields ---
**Author:** ![Czarcasm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/czarcasm/32/4050_2.png) [@Czarcasm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Czarcasm)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2016, 7:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/leonhard-euler-place-in-mathematical-history/742399/18 "2016-01-07T19:49:00Z")
> [@thanatic](#): > > mathematicians love to rate Euler as one of the greatest of all time, but how > > he was a Christian, he believed in a God? How, in your mind, would the latter affect the former? ---
**Author:** ![thanatic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/97f17d/32.png) [@thanatic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/thanatic)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2016, 8:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/leonhard-euler-place-in-mathematical-history/742399/19 "2016-01-07T20:19:23Z")
> [@Czarcasm](#): > > How, in your mind, would the latter affect the former? im arguing that Euler could of possibly got his inspiration for mathematics from god ---
**Author:** ![Czarcasm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/czarcasm/32/4050_2.png) [@Czarcasm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Czarcasm)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2016, 8:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/leonhard-euler-place-in-mathematical-history/742399/20 "2016-01-07T20:51:44Z")
> [@thanatic](#): > > im arguing that Euler could of possibly got his inspiration for mathematics from god You’re doing it badly, then. Let’s hear the argument. [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/leonhard-euler-place-in-mathematical-history/742399.md?page=2)