Ramble, Part 33: Function-al notation

It would, I think, be hard to dispute that the greatest mathematician of the eighteenth century was Leonhard Euler. (It would not be impossible. Newton lived and continued publishing until 1727, though most of his work dated to the previous century, and Gauss began his spectacular career in 1796. I would regard the raising of such points as quibbling. Yes, I'm aware of the irony.) His work touched on every area of mathematics, and he was easily the most prolific writer in the history of the subject. (The Swiss Society of Natural Science began assembling his collected works in 1909, and they are not yet done. When finished, it will consist of over a hundred large folio volumes.) For the moment, though, I want to concentrate on his contributions to mathematical notation. It was he who gave the name e to the base of natural logarithms, and i to the square root of -1. The use of the letter Σ to represent summation is his also. Perhaps most consequential, though, was his introduction of functional notation - the representation of the relation between two variables x and y by the equation y=f(x).

( Reification )

Ramble Contents