Euler, I’ve got your number

Brian Wilson

When I was a senior in high school I had a deep and abiding hatred for Leonhard Euler.

Normally, that adolescent level of dislike would have been reserved for a crush who stomped on my heart or the guy who I thought of as good friend who ended up dating said former crush and went on to marry her, have three kids and a boat and who are currently planning a trip to the Bahamas.

If anything my dislike of Euler goes beyond that. Not so much because of him necessarily, but because of the unrealistic standard he set for everyone that followed him. This is pretty impressive for a guy who died more than 200 years ago.

Leonhard Euler lived from 1707 to 1783. His Wikipedia refers to him as “ Swiss mathematician” a more accurate description would be as the guy who virtually everything in math and physics seems to be named after. Things got so bad that in order to prevent everything from being named after Euler, they started to name them after the guys who “discovered” them after he did just to be fair.

Imagine being the guy who devoted his life to coming up with a nifty formula only to have an asterisk next to your name in the mathematics history books noting that Euler had gotten there first, but was being magnanimous that day so didn’t take credit for it.

Like I said, I hated Euler with the passion of a 1,000 suns and still occasionally will invoke his name when simple swearing doesn’t cut it, like when the nail slips and you end up hammering your thumb or putting the screw through your fingernail.

My dislike of Euler was fostered while sitting in a dual- credit calculus class in my senior year of high school. Our assignment was to replicate how Euler came up with Euler’s number.

In case you are wondering, Euler’s number in the math world goes by “e” and is about 2.71828. It is one of those mathematical constants like “pi” which are necessary to understand a whole lot of other math stuff.

My teacher felt it was necessary for us to have a deep understanding of how Euler came up with this number including developing proofs showing that he was right. Setting aside that literally dozens of concepts in mathematics and physics are named after the guy and his work has been the basis of equations for two centuries, the idea of proving something that has already been proven before seemed a bit redundant to me. Looking back, many of my issues in high school, and in life in general, would not have existed if I had learned to keep my opinions to myself. My teacher was less than amused with my vocal grumbling.

I think it was that class that ultimately turned me off to math in general. I am all for exploring how things work on my own time, but in a practical sense I didn’t really need to know how Euler came up with his number any more than I need to know how Charles Goodyear came up with his method of vulcanizing rubber, to change my car’s tires.

The challenge of teaching anything, is that a passionate teacher occasionally forgets that their students care far less about the topic than they do. This is not to say that we should dumb down topics or ignore theory, but that it helps to have some sort of real world application. Being able to come up with 23 different ways to add two numbers together doesn’t help me when I am trying to figure out the tip at a restaurant or making sure the bartender gave me back the right amount of change.

One of the best math and physics lessons I ever learned was in ninth grade during a study hall and was taught by a guidance counselor. He was watching us not do our homework and listening to a group of boys talk about NASCAR races and one of them wondering out loud about why the tracks are slanted in the turns. The guidance counselor proceeded to spend the next 20 minutes explaining force and motion and the math involved in determining just how much berm was needed on the track.

If we want people to be engaged in math and sciences there needs to be a hands on approach that shows why this is meaningful to know or how to use it to my benefit rather than just theory about why it exists.

Brian Wilson is News Editor at The Star News.