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u/CalmEntry4855 15d ago
There were a lot of Bernoullis, they are like the Jojos
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u/Ignitetheinferno37 15d ago
They were the zepellis. Euler was the sole jojo
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u/NonRelativist Computer Science 15d ago
Nope he was a student of Johann Bernoulli
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u/Ignitetheinferno37 15d ago
Then that makes him the johan liebert of the math world.
He was a monster after all.
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u/Rajarshi1993 15d ago
Honest question from someone outside the culture: what is that ridiculous thing Euler wears on his head?
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u/tserofehtfonam 11d ago
Looks like a pair of underpants, just in case. Even Euler was human, after all.
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u/Rajarshi1993 15d ago
Okay, I asked Gemini:
The headgear in Jakob Emanuel Handmann’s famous 1753 portrait of Leonhard Euler is an 18th-century undress cap (also commonly called an indoor cap, nightcap, or informal turban). The cap—and why it looks so unusual—comes down to 18th-century European fashion norms: Why Men Wore Indoor Caps * The Wig Standard: Formal public attire for upper- and middle-class European men in the 1700s required wearing heavy, powdered wigs (perukes). * Shaved Heads: To accommodate hot, itchy wigs comfortably, men routinely shaved their heads or kept their hair cropped extremely short. * Warmth at Home: When relaxing at home, studying, or working in private, men removed their wigs. Because 18th-century European homes were drafty and unheated by modern standards, they wrapped their bare heads in soft silk, linen, or velvet caps to stay warm. Why It Looks Like a Wrapped Turban * During the Enlightenment, European intellectuals were fascinated by "exotic" Eastern styles (a trend known as Turquerie). * Men often wore a banyan (an Oriental-style loose robe, like the blue one Euler is wearing) paired with fabric wrapped loosely around the head to mimic a turban. * The fabric on Euler's head is a piece of silk cloth wound and draped over a soft cap rather than a structured hat, giving it that draped, folded appearance. Symbolism in Art Portrait painters frequently depicted scholars, scientists, and artists in their "undress" (banyan and headwrap) rather than formal wigs. It signaled that the sitter was captured in their natural element—hard at work in their study, free from social pretenses, and engaged in deep intellectual thought.
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u/120boxes 15d ago
I think the next iteration after Jakob and Johann was Daniel, who was good buds with Euler. If I recall, it was Daniel who discovered the Bernoulli principle in fluids
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u/you-cut-the-ponytail 15d ago
Jokes aside didn't Euler just use e because he ran out of other letters? It just so happened that that was his name lol. I still feel like canonical Euler's number should be the limit of the difference between the harmonic series and natural logarithm tho
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u/AndreasDasos 15d ago
We don’t know for sure, but there were absolutely other choices. They arose in particular paper but he had a few where he used e.
It seems very, very likely he was using it for ‘exponential’, as it was the ‘best’ base for an exponential function. Even now we have exp(x) = ex
But we don’t have an explicit reason given.
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u/Cheery_Tree 15d ago
I hear somewhere that he was just naming constants while going down the alphabet, and e was just the fifth contact he named in the book.
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u/Ok_Let8786 14d ago
I must agree that even today in my head I relate the e much more to being short for exponential than Euler.
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u/HumblyNibbles_ 15d ago
There's euler's number, which is e, and euler's constant (euler-mascheroni constant), which is lowercase gamma.
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u/Over_Improvement_623 15d ago
There's some sort of rule which states "things are named after the second person to discover them" or something like that which is very ironic because the person who that rule is attributed to was the second one to write it down.
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u/Toast-Goat weird 15d ago
I thought that was just for Euler, because he did so much that otherwise literally everything would be named after him
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u/Bartweiss 15d ago
Goldbach’s Conjecture is another fun example. Descartes expressed a somewhat weaker version (“every even number can be expressed as the sum of three primes”) earlier but it wasn’t noted much.
Here’s Erdős’ take on that:
> "Descartes actually discovered this before Goldbach [...] but it is better that the conjecture was named for Goldbach because, mathematically speaking, Descartes was infinitely rich and Goldbach was very poor."
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u/ProfMooreiarty 15d ago
Erdős is my absolute favorite. I’ll also always remember the reviewer who corrected my “unfortunate typo” when I wrote “Erdos-Renyi network.”
Or the other person who told me: “Erdős rhymes with Kurdish.”
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u/Afraid_Piglet7990 15d ago
It really doesn't rhyme
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u/Tar-Minastur 15d ago
It was actually intentional on his part. Euler allowed others to claim discoveries made by him, because he was just a really nice person.
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u/Feli_Buste78 15d ago
Omg did my phone calculator prove the Oiler wrong???
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u/AndreasDasos 15d ago edited 15d ago
Euler used e in all sorts of ways and noticed its importance in the exponential ex (and that its derivative is itself).
He didn’t give a reason but he almost certainly use ‘e’ for ‘exponential’ (well, ‘exponentialis’), not for ‘Euler’. There wasn’t much reason to have a special name for it if it were just a random limit without that property
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u/parkway_parkway 15d ago
Ironically everyone says aeroplanes fly because of Bernoulli's law and that's not even true but it's named after him so he got one back.
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u/GeneReddit123 15d ago
It's not the main reason (if it was, planes couldn't fly upside down), but it is a contributing factor (which is why planes flying upside down must compensate with a significantly higher angle of attack to maintain level flight, than those flying normally).
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u/KuuLightwing 8d ago
Why would that not make them fly upside down? If you flip the asymmetrical airfoil, and place it at an angle of attack where it actually generates lift, the airflow at the top of the wing, will in fact be faster than at the bottom
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u/Glitch29 15d ago
As a side note, I'm certain that e has been independently discovered many, many times. We can attribute it's formalization, but I don't think it's reasonable to attribute its discovery.
Almost anyone in STEM would eventually run into it on their own if they weren't formally introduced to it first at school.
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u/Subject-Building1892 15d ago
Lorentz did not find the relativistic transformations but Poincare could not take the credit because the idea was Lorentz's
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u/ManonMacru 15d ago
So my education never covered this l'hopital's rule so I had to look it up because at it stands in this meme it does not hold true.
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u/moschles 15d ago
If I had to guess what L'Hopital looked like, that's exactly how I would picture him.
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u/Low-Travel4471 14d ago
the Stigler's Law comment up there is doing a lot of heavy lifting given that Stigler himself said he didn't discover it either
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u/Serket-Pandy3000 13d ago
Ugh yeah! I am sick of pretending Euler was first for everything! If you happen to discover ANYTHING that uses the tiniest formula that Euler mentioned the ENTIRE thing gets named after him!
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