ISBN: 9798170094592 - the music of reason: euler and the patterns of thought (1 Ergebnisse)

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - In 1907 the Swiss Academy of Sciences appointed a committee to publish everything Leonhard Euler had written. The committee is still working. Eighty volumes have appeared, the correspondence has been driven onto the internet for want of paper, and a rotating cast of living mathematicians has spent more than a century failing to catch up with one dead Swiss.Euler gave us the symbols we think in. The letter e, the imaginary unit i, the notation f(x) for a function, the summation sign, the modern use of pi, sine and cosine as functions rather than lines in a diagram - open any textbook in any science and you are reading his handwriting without knowing his name. He founded topology by refusing to measure anything, invented the mathematics of conditions rather than causes, built a musical instrument out of prime numbers, and went blind in the middle of it all, after which his output roughly doubled.He was also, inconveniently for his biographers, happy. No persecution, no madness, no poverty, no feud that cost him a friend. Thirteen children, a good salary, an unshakable faith, and a memory that held the entire Aeneid. Even the invading army that sacked his farm sent him compensation, and the Empress added four thousand roubles on top.This book tells the story of the most productive mind in the history of science through a single gesture he made over and over: throw away everything you can measure, and look at what is connected to what. That gesture built graph theory, topology, and the calculus of variations. It is also the gesture at the heart of my own research programme in structural persistence and information physics, which runs through these pages as the living continuation of an eighteenth-century walk across seven bridges.No equations. No prior training required. Only a long argument, told with affection, about a man who calculated as other men breathe, and about why the shape of a thing so often outlasts its size.Keywords: Leonhard Euler, history of mathematics, topology, Enlightenment science, graph theory, mathematical notation, complex systems.…