Read Euler, Read Euler, He is the Master of Us All

I think sunday is a good day to explore your interest and practice your hobbies. I have been studying Fourier Analysis recently and also reading about the history of mathematics. I came to realize the importance of learning from the masters.

Why would you talk to a priest when you can talk to the God himself (or herself)?

Sometimes we might have a very strange feeling that certain events are connected and the progress towards a tipping point is inevitable. This post is about one such event.

This week I was studying Fourier series and I learned one could solve Basel problem, which is to solve the following equation:

$\sum_{n=1}^{\infty} \frac{1}{n^2} = 1 + \frac{1}{4} + \frac{1}{9} + \frac{1}{16} + \cdots$

In this post I showed how to solve this problem using Fourier series.

During the same week I was reading a book called Prime Obsession by John Derbyshire. In this book, the author talks about the history of prime numbers and the Riemann Hypothesis. Some of the chapters mention the Basel problem and Euler’s solution to it. The author states that reading Euler’s work is very easy and it is a good way to learn mathematics.

At the same time, the author also recommends reading a book called Gamma: Exploring Euler’s Constant by Julian Havil. In this book, Freeman Dyson (a famous physicist) argues that there is a better way to learn mathematics than reading textbooks. He says that The third way is to use a historical approach to mathematics, teaching the practical skills that students need, but in the context of the history of the time when these skills were first developed.

Somehow, all those readings lead me to find an article by Harold M. Edwards, which is called Rad the Masters! In this article, the author talks about the importance of reading the masters. I refer readers to this article for more details.

After reading this article, I thought it would be more enjoyable on Sunday to watch a documentary about Euler and his work. Then, I found the following video from youtube.

From this video, I learned that The Mathematical Association of America (MAA) has a website called The Euler Archive, which contains all of Euler’s work. I also learned that Euler was a very prolific mathematician and he wrote more than 800 papers and books.

On this website, you will find all of Euler’s work in the original language (mostly Latin) and also in English. You can also find many other resources about Euler’s work. Among all the resources, two of them caught my attention:

• How Euler Did It
• Euleriana

I cannot describe how happy I was when I found these resources. I think I will spend a lot of time reading Euler’s work and learning from the master himself. I remember when I begun to learn Guitar, I thought my life would be busy anyway as Bob Dylan has more than 500 songs and I have to learn all of them. I think I will have the same feeling about Euler’s work.

Hope now you will also have a feeling of exuberance after realizing that you can learn from the master himself.

So, Enjoy!

Once I finished this post, I found the following map from Pacific’s Scholarly Commons Follow, which is the host of the Euleriana website. I think this map is a good way to end this post.

Figure 1. The map of visitors to Euleriana website.

Sometimes, I also refer myself as a data scientist. So, from this map, I can confidently predict that the rise of China is inevitable. Of course, I only checked the first 10% of the visitors but I don’t think the distribution will change much if I check the rest of the visitors.