List of things named after Leonhard Euler | Hacker News Reader

List of things named after Leonhard Euler

en.wikipedia.org

69 pointsvezycash24 comments

A good snippet to come back to whenever one needs to be humbled:

Euler's work touched upon so many fields that he is often the earliest written reference on a given matter. In an effort to avoid naming everything after Euler, some discoveries and theorems are attributed to the first person to have proved them after Euler.

If you think that might make you humbled, then consider that he was completely blind at the end of his life and he was still coming up with new discoveries and conversing with other mathematicians via scribes.

And raised, with limited success, 13 kids.

There should be acknowledgement that so much was initiated by his work. Perhaps via xxx-Euler's formula or something.

    ~> p | egrep 'Euler[-–][^ ]+' | sort
    Euler–Bernoulli beam equation, a fourth-order ODE concerning the elasticity of structural beams.
    Euler–Cauchy equation, a linear equidimensional second-order ODEs with variable coefficients. Its second-order version can emerge from Laplace equation in polar coordinates.
    Euler–Fermat theorem, that aφ(m) ≡ 1 (mod m) whenever a is coprime to m, and φ is Euler's totient function
    Euler–Fokker genus
    Euler–Lagrange equation, a second-order ODE emerging from minimization problems in calculus of variations.
    Euler–Lotka equation, a characteristic equation employed in mathematical demography
    Euler–Maclaurin formula (Euler's summation formula) relating integrals to sums
    Euler–Mascheroni constant, γ ≈ 0.5772, the limiting difference between the harmonic series and the natural logarithm.
    Euler–Poisson–Darboux equation, a second-order PDE playing important role in solving the wave equation.
    Euler–Rodrigues formula describing the rotation of a vector in three dimensions
    Euler–Tricomi equation – a second-order PDE emerging from Euler conservation equations.

There’s some of the same phenomenon going on with Gauss, as well. Not coincidentally, Gauss was probably the last person who truly understood all of mathematics, as it was known in his time.

For those mathematically inclined, I highly recommend "Introduction to the Analysis of the Infinite": https://www.springer.com/us/book/9780387968247

It's fascinating to see how Euler thought about things like infinite series, derivatives, etc. before they were formalized hundreds of years later. You'll find him make "mistakes" (i.e.,assumptions which are not true) but he always gets the right answer. Look for, in particular, his proof that \sum \frac{1}{n^2} = \frac{\pi^2}{6}.

Stayed in the Hotel Euler (not mentioned on the page) when I visited Basel. In the restaurant were no pictures of or anything related to Leonhard, at least not that I saw, but plenty of owls (eulen).

Edmonton Eulers of the NHL

Also can't forget the Houston Eulers of the NFL

Things in fiction also get named after Euler quite often, like the Euler aliens from the Looking Glass series.

Please don't let be be the only person to have misread Euler as Ruler.

You may have misread it as "ruler", but the problem I had was calling him Oo-ler. Turns out you pronounce it Oi-ler.

There was a initial 'its named after somebody?'. Then 'what else is named after him??' So it was a double whammy.

Yes my internal voice pronounces it rhyming with ruler.

But then most open source projects have strange pronunciations that I don't pronounce properly (to myself) anyway.

Well, shit. I've been saying "yoo-ler" my entire adult life.

Yoo-leh is the most common British dialect version which does chime with Euclid. I did also hear an English great grandson of Euler pronounce it that way in a documentary.

US is resolute that "oiler" is phonetically correct. The "oi" is arguably superior but the Swiss and German versions end in a sort of "euh" sound rather than a strong "er".

With "oiler" also being a word in its own right, some satirical potential could tint international debate over its correctitude.

"Eu say tomatoe, Eu say tomatoe"

Okay it's supposed to be tomato or tomatoes. Am I missing an extra level to this joke?

It's tomayyto or tomahhto, but they're spelled the same way.

OT, but I've never once actually heard someone pronounce it "tomahhto" outside of this expression. Is this actually a pronunciation that people use?

I think it's a British thing.

Oh, interesting! I honestly had no idea

That's how the English pronounce it (and they created the English language![1]), probably quite posh if they're saying it with 2 aitches.

[1] created is probably a bit strong, evolved? Smooshed together?

It's how I say it. Australians and the English say it this way. I'm fairly sure lots of other nations do too.

Pardon my fuzzy spelling. The joke was just around "yoo say.. oi say.."

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