Leonhard Euler (1707 – 1783), a native of my beloved Switzerland, is widely considered to have been the foremost mathematician of the eighteenth century.
Euler’s identity or Euler’s equation, shown above, has been identified in at least one survey of mathematicians as the most beautiful of all equations, because of the simple elegance of the way in which it relates the constants e (for Euler’s number, the base of natural logarithms), i (the imaginary unit, which satisfies the equation i2 = −1) and π (the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter).
“Among the mechanistic suppositions of previous generations was the idea that beauty is an inner attitude of the beholder rather than a property of the objective world. The awareness that the universe is stunningly beautiful wherever we turn our eye is now so much a conviction of our most productive scientists that objective grandeur is considered a warrant of truth.” (Thomas Dubay, The Evidential Power of Beauty: Science and Theology Meet [San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1999], 38-39.
An interesting thought, that.
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