WI: Leonard Euler doesn't go into mathmatics

What happens if Leonard Euler's father got his wish and Leonard becomes a pastor instead of a mathematician?

Development of mathematics will probably not change much. As often, most of Euler's ideas were “in the air”, and Gauß is sure to mop up anything left.

Of course, the “bridges of Königsberg” would be known by another name - a good candidate for a city with both islands and mathematicians is Paris. With the Pont Saint-Louis connecting the two islands (built in 1630), they both have an odd number of bridges. Therefore the existence of an Eulerian graph depends on the parity of the number of bridges on any one bank (it is the same since any bridge has two ends). On the left bank you have 7 bridges, going downstream: Tournelle, Archevêché, Pont au Double, Petit-Pont, Pont Saint-Michel, Pont-Neuf, and Pont-Royal; so that there exists no Eulerian path. But in 1787, you also get the Pont Louis-XVI (now Pont de la Concorde) which solves this. (The next bridges are the Pont de Sully and Pont du Carrousel, in the 1830s). Of course, the city is a bit larger than Königsberg, so the hike will be longer. Expect the aristocrat to do it in a sedan chair :)
 

Tyr Anazasi

Banned
The seven bridges of Königsberg:

Grüne Brücke (destroyed in ww2, replaced by new bridge)

Krämerbrücke (destroyed, replaced)

Schmiedebrücke (destroyed)

Köttelbrücke (destroyed)

Honigbrücke (still extant)

Holzbrücke (dito)

Hohe Brücke (dito, but replaced by a modern bridge in 1937, full functional)


K%C3%B6nigsberger_Br%C3%BCckenproblem
 
The history of scientifical development is linear: from one step you go to the next one. If a great scientist die the only effect is a delay in the development. It works also the other way: we don't know how many giants we miss because they were e.g. killed on battlefields in their youths but, in any case linear story remains.

An example is all the WI I saw about steam turbines in imperial Rome: without basic calculus you cannot understant the physics of thermal cycles and design accordingly machines. It is not a coincidence that the steam era comes about a century after Newton and Leibnitz.
 
What happens if Leonard Euler's father got his wish and Leonard becomes a pastor instead of a mathematician?

Is there any reason why he couldn't do both ? It's not like mathematician was a full-time job in those days.

Cheers,
Nigel.
 
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While Euler was incredibly brilliant, and made lots of advances, much of his work in calculus, at least, would be done by others not very much later. There was a massive flowering of good/great mathematicians around then. The Bernoulli brothers, Jacobi, etc. If Iv got my dates right.
 
While Euler was incredibly brilliant, and made lots of advances, much of his work in calculus, at least, would be done by others not very much later. There was a massive flowering of good/great mathematicians around then. The Bernoulli brothers, Jacobi, etc. If Iv got my dates right.

Actually, the Bernoulli were Euler's teachers, so they precede him slightly. But still, this leaves plenty of people to work things out. The main delay will probably in mathematic notations, as Euler had a huge input in standardizing it (such things as the uses of indices and exponents, summation, reconciliating both notations for derivatives, and of course the letter e for exp(1)).

After all, there is a reason that a lot of Euler things are called Euler-someone. Without him, you would probably get the Goldbach conjecture, the Maclaurin summation formula, the Mascheroni constant, and the Lagrange variational equation.
 
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