C0REW4R (mog/acc)

In 1772 an eye operation left Leonhard Euler almost completely blind. He could still do the mathematics. He could not read it or write it. So he needed someone. Not a copyist — someone who could follow him. Euler turned to his old friend Daniel Bernoulli in Basel. Bernoulli knew exactly who to send. Nicolas Fuss arrived in St Petersburg in May 1773. He was eighteen. He stayed for the rest of his life. At Euler’s side he helped push more than 250 papers into print. Not transcription — he developed the ideas, built the tables, worked the examples. Then Euler died in 1783, and the assistant became the scientist. Academician that same year. Professor of mathematics. And from 1800 until his own death in 1826, permanent secretary of the Imperial Academy of Sciences. There is a theorem named after him. A sequence of numbers too. And late in life he did one more thing. He took the algebra he had learned at Euler’s elbow and built it into a course for the schools of the Russian Empire. Three volumes. Algebra. Then geometry. Then the application of algebra to geometry — trigonometry, conic sections, and the foundations of the calculus. That trilogy is where Russian school mathematics begins. Kiselev comes after it. The Soviet school comes after Kiselev. Part I — Algebra, 1820. Four divisions, 59 chapters, 570 sections. From what it means for a letter to stand for a quantity, all the way to the irreducible case of the cubic. Two hundred years. No English edition. Not once. Until today. amazon.com/dp/1809100054 youtube.com/watch?v=vlZfHBlP… russianmathbooks.com