Google honours Swiss mathematician

Google honours Swiss mathematician, Leonhard Euler with a doodle


Google's today's doodle takes you back to your good ol' classroom, this time to honour the Swiss mathematician and physicist, Leonhard Euler on his birth anniversary.

If you've missed seeing an endearing doodle for sometime now, then this one totally makes up for it. A partially animated one, today's doodle includes geometrical figures and mathematical formulae, scribbled on a partially yellow piece of paper. Some of the mathematical elements on the doodle, include the mathematical constant, his polyhedral formula, now written as v-e+f=2.

An important name in the field of mathematics, Euler's genius can be affirmed from the fact that he is the only mathematician to have two numbers named after him - the Euler's number in calculus (e, i.e. approximately equal to 2.71828), and the Euler's Mascheroni Constant (gamma), also called as "Euler's constant" (approximately equal to 0.57721).

Honoring the Swiss mathematician!

Euler's contribution in the field of mathematics, include works covering geometry, infinitesimal calculus, trigonometry, algebra, and number theory, as well as continuum physics, lunar theory and other areas of physics. Euler also lent his expertise in developing the Euler-Bernoulli beam equation.

The renowned mathematician was born on this day in 1707, in Basel, Switzerland to a pastor of the Reformed Church. Johann Bernoulli, Europe's renowned mathematician exercised the most important influence on young Euler. It was Bernoulli who convinced Euler's father of his son's incredible talent - Euler at the time had been learning theology, Greek and Hebrew at his father's insistence to become a pastor.

He breathed his last, hours after suffering a fatal bout of brain hemorrhage on September 18, 1783.

You’d be forgiven if this doodle were to remind you faintly of another one that Google put out only months ago. On December 22, last year, Google.com commemorated the 125th birth anniversary of the mathematical genius that was Srinivasa Ramanujan. Born on December 22,1887 in Erode, in the then Madras Presidency, Srinivasa Ramanujan's name is held in high reverence for his contribution to mathematical analysis, number theory, infinite series and continued fractions.

Ramanujan is known to have lived in India totally disconnected with the buzzing mathematical community in Europe, which led him to do his own research. G.H. Hardy, another prolific English mathematician, considered Ramanujan to be a natural genius. Ramanujan was born in a poor Brahmin family and was introduced to formal mathematics at the age of 10. Little Ramanujan exhibited natural ability and mastered the books on advanced trigonometry authored by S.L. Loney by the age of 12. Ramanujan even discovered theorems of his own and re-discovered Euler's identity independently. By the time he was 17, Ramanujan carried out his own mathematical research on Bernoulli numbers and the Euler–Mascheroni constant.

Report by : Anuradha Shetty

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