Johann II Bernoulli

Johann II Bernoulli (born May 18, 1710 in Basel ; † July 17, 1790 ibid) was a Swiss mathematician, physicist and lawyer from the famous Bernoulli family of mathematicians in Basel .

Life

Johann II Bernoulli was the third of five sons of Johann I Bernoulli . In 1724 he received his master's degree with Leonhard Euler and then, like Maupertuis , whose close friend he became, studied with his father. In 1732 he received his doctorate in law. Then he went on a trip to Europe. He visited his brother Daniel Bernoulli in St. Petersburg and was in Paris . Then he was in Basel, where he worked with his father, became professor of eloquence in 1743 and, after his father's death, in 1748, his father's successor as professor of mathematics. This had contributed to the fact that he won the Académie des Sciences prize no less than four times (1736 with a work on the propagation of light, 1737 on the shape of anchors, 1741 on ship winches, 1746 with Daniel Bernoulli on the theory of magnets). In 1765 he was rector of the University of Basel .

Bernoulli received invitations to Berlin from Euler and Maupertuis, but in 1746 only became a foreign member of the Berlin Academy. When his friend Maupertuis was deposed as president of the Berlin Academy - not least at the instigation of Voltaire - he came to see him in Basel in 1756, where he spent the last three years of his life. After Maupertuis's death, he sent his son Johann III Bernoulli to Berlin. Johann II Bernoulli conducted extensive scientific correspondence (more than 900 letters have survived). He also published the works of his father Johann I.

Since 1746 he was a foreign member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences . In 1782 he was elected to the Académie des Sciences .

literature

• Fritz Burckhardt: Autobiography of Johannes II Bernoulli . In: Basler Zeitschrift für Geschichte und Altertumskunde , Vol. 6, 1907, pp. 287–308. ( Digitized version )
• Cantor, Moritz:  Bernoulli, Johann II. In: General German Biography (ADB). Volume 2, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1875, pp. 480-482.
• Gottwald, Ilgauds, Schlote Lexicon of Important Mathematicians , 1990
• JO Fleckenstein: Bernoulli, Johann II . In: Charles Coulston Gillispie (Ed.): Dictionary of Scientific Biography . tape 2 : Hans Berger - Christoph Buys Ballot . Charles Scribner's Sons, New York 1970, p. 56 .

Web links

• John J. O'Connor, Edmund F. Robertson :  Johann II Bernoulli. In: MacTutor History of Mathematics archive .
• Fritz Nagel: Bernoulli, Johann. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland .
• Fritz Nagel and Sulamith Gehr (eds.): Basel edition of the Bernoulli correspondence. Retrieved September 6, 2012 . 

Individual evidence

1. ^ Members of the previous academies. Johann (II.) Bernoulli. Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities , accessed on February 21, 2015 . 
2. ^ List of members since 1666: Letter B. Académie des sciences, accessed on September 18, 2019 (French).