A Tribute to Euler

Among history's greatest mathematicians is Leonhard Euler (1707-1783), the Swiss genius who produced an astonishing 25,000 pages of pure and applied mathematics of the very highest quality. In this talk, we sketch Euler's life and describe a few of his contributions to number theory, algebra, and other branches of mathematics. Then we examine a particular Eulerian theorem: his simple but beautiful proof that there are as many ways to decompose a whole number as the sum of distinct summands as there are ways to decompose it as the sum of (not necessarily distinct) odd summands.

About the Lecturer
William Dunham, who received his B.S. (1969) from the University of Pittsburgh and his M.S. (1970) and Ph.D. (1974) from Ohio State, is the Truman Koehler Professor of Mathematics at Muhlenberg College.

Related Links:
The Story of Maths - The Frontiers of Space