Physics Faces

Leonard Euler  (1707-1783)

 “Euler was an important contributor to problems of physics and engineering including celestial mechanics, elasticity theory, and the mechnaics of fluids. Maupertuis, the president of the Berlin academy of which Euler was the most fruitful member, had begun to formulate problems in mechanics as problems of minimizing path integrals of functions such as the velocity of a particle. Euler was the first to systematize Maupertuis’ ideas in a calculus of variations and to create general methods for their solution. He showed how minimization of the integral of a function between two fixed points could be reduced to the solution of a differential equation, now the famous Euler-Lagrange equation.”

From: The Shaggy Steed of Physics by David Oliver, Springer-Verlag, 1994.