Leonhard Euler's Letters to a German Princess
mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk
mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk
A 20th century mathematician with a similar problem was Paul Erdos.
No, actually that's not the case, the original letters are in French, and probably not even available anymore. They must have OCRed an old edition like this https://archive.org/details/lettersofeuleron01eule/page/n71/...
for one, my eyebrows would be through the roof. A blog post every 3 days, for 2 straight years? Extremely surprising, notable and impressive (dear HNer, please spare us the comments about AI)
If you're going to give notes, give correct notes. Otherwise you impress as one who thinks he's the smartest guy in the room, and a guy like that never is.
> If you're going to give notes, give correct notes. Otherwise you impress as one who thinks he's the smartest guy in the room, and a guy like that never is.
You did not come across well there.
That said, I do think your understanding may be usefully clarified for a bit of further analysis of the figure. "Might could" means "may be able to", and is constructed accordingly. No one would say "be able to may", and "could might" rings likewise false. The same meaning constructed from two modal verbs yields "could maybe," which is something I've often both heard and said.
I'd also note that there are lots of common English vernacular constructions, especially in more distinct dialects such as AAVE and my own Southern American English, which rarely appear in dictionaries. While we're burdened with no formal equivalent of l'Academie at least, there is a strong strain of prescriptivism wrapped around the loosely defined but quite real American system of social class, and relatively disfavored dialects such as both I just named consequently come in for a great deal of "that's not real English," with their figures often relegated to lexicons despite possessing as clear and consistent an internal grammar as any other English dialect - at least until they're adopted into mesolect, as with "y'all" and, thanks to Twitter putting a turbocharger on the appropriation of linguistic culture, roughly half of AAVE - in both cases, quite poorly. Comparing AAVE and SAE is always fraught given the history, even if that history needs to be a little esoteric to appreciate that a planter would've spoken quite differently from me, and thought me white trash besides. But I think it's fair to say both dialects about equally honor the music of language, albeit in somewhat different ways; meanwhile, the dialect of American mass culture insists on the tinniest of ears, and that above all else is what a modern American English dictionary seeks to document and formulate.
This isn't precisely to impugn the compilers of dictionaries, who do mostly good work despite my differences with their approach. It is to say it's worth knowing that for a lot of vernacular especially among disfavored dialects, a strong intuitive sense of English linguistics and the history of the language will often yield a clearer understanding.
Why do you think he was required to verbally bow and scrape? The sample letters here show nothing more than ornate politeness.
His brilliance was known in his own time and he was respected and established at court.
Whether he saw advantage in this connection for financial, social or purely altruistic reasons is debatable, but it is presumptive I think to declare subservience.
More exploration of the possible context and relationship between them here:
https://arxiv.org/abs/1406.7417v1
(Edit: paper also linked earlier in another comment in this thread)
Royalty commanded resources which Euler wanted to access, even if indirectly. In the modern world, geniuses have to do the same to e.g. gain funding. Maybe there is slightly more meritocracy now in determining who gains that level of power, but the improvement is not nearly as dramatic as you'd like to think. Nepotism is alive and well.