[ExI] Euler day

BillK pharos at gmail.com
Mon Apr 15 16:38:08 UTC 2013


On Mon, Apr 15, 2013 at 4:40 PM, Anders Sandberg wrote:
> One cool thing with Euler is that he often gave several different proofs of
> the same theorem, probably because he knew his methods were not always
> correct. And his proofs were often *very* different in style - this
> robustness-increasing method (which I *strongly* favor - see
> http://www.gwern.net/The%20Existential%20Risk%20of%20Mathematical%20Error )
> is somewhat work-intensive, and most of us have a hard time making
> uncorrelated proofs. But Euler could.
>
> So in a sense many theorems should be called the "Euler-Euler-Euler theorem"
> since he was the first to prove it in utterly different ways.
>

Spike omitted to mention ...........

 "How many mathematicians does it take to change a light bulb?"
 "-e^i*pi".



(which, of course, equals 1).


BillK



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