GENIUS LOCI OF THE RUSSIAN ACADEMY

Continuing my To Russia with Greatness series, this primarily informative entry is about one of the greatest mathematicians who ever lived, Swiss-born Leonhard Euler. The title points to Euler’s characterization made by the great Soviet physicist Academician Sergei Ivanovich Vavilov: “Together with Peter I and Lomonosov, Euler had become the good genius of our Academy, defining its glory, its fortitude, and its productiveness.”

Leonhard Euler needs no introduction to the science world, but perhaps he needs one for the general reader. Here is such an introduction formally quoted from Webster’s Biographical Dictionary.---

Euler, Leonhard. 1707-1783. Swiss mathematician and physicist; one of the founders of pure mathematics. Called to St. Petersburg by Catherine I (1727), where he became Professor of Physics (1730), and later of Mathematics (1733); called to Berlin by Frederick the Great (1741), becoming Director of Mathematics at the Academy of Science (1744); recalled to St. Petersburg (1766). Lost sight of one eye in 1735, and of the other in 1766, but continued working. Founder of the calculus of variation, on which he published the first textbook; author of works on analytic mathematics, algebra, and other mathematical subjects, and also on analytic mechanics, hydrodynamics, astronomy, optics, and acoustics. He devised a system of logarithms to facilitate musical calculations.

This is obviously both an incomplete and rather inadequate representation of the great Euler. To begin with, it does not state that he was indeed a world-historical pillar of mathematics and science, to whom Gauss and a host of important others would pay an impassioned tribute. He was also a kind and generous man who had nothing but good words and good deeds for every living soul who ever crossed his path, whether deservedly or not. But the most important feature of his life, in the context of this section and perhaps in the context of his whole life, was his long-standing connection to Russia. It was indeed Russia who gave him his first and career-defining employment before he had reached the young age of twenty. Having spent fourteen years at the St. Petersburg Academy, he rather rashly moved to Berlin in 1741, during the period of serious political instability in Russia, but even there, in Berlin, he was still receiving generous financial support from the new Russian Empress Elizaveta Petrovna, and continued to be counted as an Academy Member. In 1766 the new Empress of Russia Catherine the Great offered Euler a dream deal to return, and so he did, to remain in the country for the rest of his life and to be buried there as a Russian genius of foreign birth, but of native spirit. Not surprisingly, and with good justification, Russia has called him Russian, and he reciprocated by having acquired a fluency in the Russian language and an admitted attachment to his adoptive country. (My reader should be reminded that for two hundred years from Peter the Great until the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, there was no need for any foreigner either in St. Petersburg or in Moscow to learn Russian, as French and German were predominantly spoken at the Court and by all educated Russian nobility, at the expense of their own Russian language.

Euler’s life in Russia is one of the best examples of a foreign genius coming "to Russia with Greatness," and Russia opening her arms with generosity and appreciation, to result in a most wonderful marriage.