Nikolaus I Bernoulli
Nicholas I Bernoulli (born October 10, jul. / 20th October 1687 greg. In Basel , † 29. November 1759 in Basel) was a Swiss mathematician .
family
He comes from the ramified family of scholars Bernoulli and is a nephew of Jakob I Bernoulli and Johann I Bernoulli . He is the cousin of Nikolaus II Bernoulli , who worked in a similar field but died early.
Life
In 1704 he graduated from the University of Basel under Jakob I Bernoulli and 5 years later he did his doctorate on the application of probability theory in legal matters. In 1716 he was appointed to the Galileo chair in Padua , where he worked in the fields of differential equations and geometry . In 1722 he returned to Switzerland and took over the chair for logic at the University of Basel . He served as rector five times (1738, 1739, 1743, 1747 and 1755) .
According to an assessment by Joachim Otto Fleckenstein , he was a talented but not a productive mathematician. His most significant achievements are hidden in his correspondence, especially that with Pierre Rémond de Montmort . In 1713, Nikolaus Bernoulli had edited the posthumous manuscript Ars conjectandi on the calculus of probabilities of his uncle Jakob Bernoulli and also exchanged letters about it with Montmort, the author of the first textbook on probability calculus (based on Jakob Bernoulli), in the second edition of which in 1713 also published 150 pages of this correspondence were. These letters discussed the problem which we now know as the Saint Petersburg Paradox , and which his cousin Daniel Bernoulli dealt extensively with in Saint Petersburg. In addition to Montmort, he also corresponded with Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Leonhard Euler .
From 1713 he was a foreign member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences . In 1714 he was elected a member of the Royal Society .
literature
- Moritz Cantor : Bernoulli, Nicholas I . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 2, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1875, p. 476 f.
- Peter Merian: Die mathematicians Bernoulli , Schweighausersche Universitäts-Buchdruckerei, Basel 1860, pages 35-38.
- Fritz Nagel: Bernoulli, Nicolaus. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland .
- Otto Spiess : Bernoulli, Nikolaus. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 2, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1955, ISBN 3-428-00183-4 , p. 131 ( digitized version ).
- JO Fleckenstein: Bernoulli, Nicholas I . In: Charles Coulston Gillispie (Ed.): Dictionary of Scientific Biography . tape 2 : Hans Berger - Christoph Buys Ballot . Charles Scribner's Sons, New York 1970, p. 56-57 .
Web links
- John J. O'Connor, Edmund F. Robertson : Nikolaus I Bernoulli. In: MacTutor History of Mathematics archive .
- Fritz Nagel and Sulamith Gehr (eds.): Basel edition of the Bernoulli correspondence. Retrieved September 6, 2012 .
Individual evidence
- ^ Members of the previous academies. Nicholas (I.) Bernoulli. Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities , accessed on February 21, 2015 .
- ^ Entry on Bernoulli, Nicholas (1687 - 1759) in the Archives of the Royal Society , London
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Bernoulli, Nicholas I |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Swiss mathematician |
| DATE OF BIRTH | October 20, 1687 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Basel |
| DATE OF DEATH | November 29, 1759 |
| Place of death | Basel |