One who investigates the life of Leonhard Euler does not proceed far without encountering details of the “Euler-Diderot Incident.” So the story goes, Czarina Catherine the Great of Russia was concerned about the deleterious effect the philosopher Diderot was having on the religious faith of the nobility who were listening to him hold forth on atheism in her court. She encouraged famous mathematician Leonard Euler to confront him, and he did, with the following challenge: “Sir, (a + bn)/z = x, hence God exists—reply!” Diderot, who, according to the story, was completely mystified by all things mathematical, fled the court and Russia in deep humiliation.
Diderot and Euler actually were in Russia at the same time, both at the invitation of the Czarina, but this is a joke at Diderot’s expense that neither Euler the man nor Euler the mathematician would have made. Even if it had been, Diderot—who was actually a fairly capable mathematician himself—would not have been stumped. Who might have started this rumor, and why? Bear in mind, accounts of it are found in literature predating the advent of the Internet message board.
Years before, Euler had been slated to follow in his father’s footsteps as a Protestant minister. While pursuing a master’s degree in philosophy at the University of Basel, Leonhard met Johann Bernoulli who recognized and fostered the young man’s mathematical talent. He convinced Euler’s father that the church was not the best showplace for his son's extraordinary gift. Euler’s connections with the Bernoulli family led him to the St. Petersburg Academy in Russia, where he became the chairman of the mathematics department.
Euler’s correspondence with Jean le Rond d’Alembert gives evidence of the falseness of the Euler-Diderot Incident tale. D’Alembert was Diderot’s close associate, and contributed articles on mathematics, philosophy and religion to the Encyclopedia on which he and Diderot were collaborating. Euler, too, was a prolific writer. His very popular Letters to a German Princess—a compendium of what he considered essential knowledge for a young member of the Prussian nobility who had been entrusted to his tutelage—contained, just as the French Encyclopedia did, treatments of topics mathematical as well as metaphysical. While Euler remained, throughout his life, a devout and traditional Christian, d’Alembert rejected traditional religion and tended toward atheism. Though Euler and d’Alembert held to and defended in writing quite divergent views on Deity, their mutual interest in mathematics, and significantly, the mutual respect each man had for the mathematical contributions of the other, laid the foundation for a friendship unmarred by dismissive disrespect over religious matters. Their friendship did hit a snag, but it concerned a mathematical disagreement over “the vibrating string problem,” nothing to do with religion.
Article comments
1 - duane
An article about Euler! Thank you. Fascinating. e^(i*pi)+1=0.
2 - Dr Dreadful
Good piece, Irene. I'd never have dreamed, slouched over my desk in the maths classroom on a dreary Monday afternoon[mumble]ty years ago, that mathematics could be interesting!
3 - Irene Athena
Thanks Duane and Dr. Dreadful.
Post-prandial math classes are never a good idea. Pie yes, pi, no.
4 - John Wilson
Good article! Interesting and lively.
5 - wet blanket
...the same serene guy who translated Benjamin Robins' work into German (with annotations) and helped advance the technology of warfare.
What a saint.
No, really. See May 24th on the Lutheran Calender.
(fun article, Irene)
6 - Irene Athena
Thanks John. Wet Blanket, Scientia non habit inimicum prater Ignoratem. See the footnote at the bottom of page 2; you'll dig the irony. I will say this about that, though. He recommended Robins' book to King Frederick even after Robins had written a scathing review of his own.
There. I've put him back on his pedestal as...the Patron Saint of Paintball Trajectory Planning.
7 - Richard Bunbury
It's "Maupertuis", with the "u" and "i" in this order. I may be fussy but I must say that after seeing the repeated misspelling I lost confidence in the rest of the article. Maupertuis is a well-known and important historical figures, and inability to spell his name doesn't bode well for the author's competence. I may be unfair, but please correct the error! Thanks.
8 - Irene Athena
Maupertuis is a well-known and important historical figures
Figure"s." You have no more chance of correcting that error in your already published comment than I have of changing, in an already published article, Maupertius to Maupertuis. Ptooey.
9 - Irene Athena
And while we're on the subject of "youse" being where you aren't supposed to be (which is where I am right now) BUnbury is a rather unconventional spelling.
Ride a cock-horse to Banbury Cross,
To see a fine lady upon a white horse;
Rings on her fingers and bells on her toes,
And she shall have music wherever she goes.
10 - Irene Athena
Richard Bunbury, I have sent the editors a request to change Maupertius to Maupertuis. Someone with a particular sensitivity to that sort of thing might have been driven up the wall, I suppose, to see that error occur five times on a single page. I'm sorry.
11 - zingzing
great article, irene. math is a foreign language to me a great deal of the time, but i always seem to enjoy it when it's slathered in drama.
12 - Irene Athena
I just took something out of the library that you might enjoy*, ZingZing.
* Correction. BORROWED. Happy Banned Books Week. :)
13 - John Lake
My heavens. Can any of us imagine living at a time when crippling and often fatal diseases were inescapable? A ruptured appendix or a swelling dental abscess often brought about an early death. Fighting influenza was a fight for life. And Euler, whom I know nothing more of than what your insight brings, worked on in spite of blindness. He was investigating you say the orbit of Uranus to the day of his death.
Utterly amazing. I could easily come to cherish the Euler-Diderot rumor; life must have been a tedious ache, a hard to ignore pain in those days, in 19th century Russia. I could say it may have been “bittersweet”, but these things seldom are.
14 - irene athena
John Lake, amazing it was. Euler's reaction to losing the sight in his right eye is reported to have been: "Now I will have less distraction."
Source: H. Eves In Mathematical Circles, Boston: Prindle, Weber and Schmidt, 1969.
That's some kind of attitude! As far as other comforts go, he did have it a lot better than the Russian peasants of his day, because Catherine the Great had given him a post at St. Petersburg Academy.