I soon found an opportunity to be introduced to a famous professor Johann Bernoulli. Euler laboriously studied all the required subjects, but this did not satisfy him. During the academic year, Bernoulli delivered daily public lectures on elementary mathematics besides that, for additional pay he conducted studies in higher mathematics and physics for those who were interested. But among the latter was Johann I Bernoulli, who had followed his brother Jakob, late in 1705, in the chair of mathematics. The university was small it comprised only a few more than a hundred students and nineteen professors. In the autumn of 1720, being not yet fourteen, Euler entered the University of Basel in the department of arts to get a general education before specializing. Euler later spent several years with his maternal grandmother in Basel, studying at a rather poor local Gymnasium mathematics was not taught at all, so Euler studied privately with Johann Burckhardt, an amateur mathematician. In the brief autobiography dictated to his eldest son in 1767, Euler recollected that for several years he diligently and thoroughly studied Christoff Rudolf’s Algebra, a difficult work (dating, in Stifel’s edition, from 1553) which only a very gifted boy could have used. In 1708 the family moved to the village of Riehen, near Basel, where Leonhard Euler spent his childhood.Įuler’s father was fond of mathematics and had attended Jakob Bernoulli’s lectures at the university he gave his son his elementary education, including mathematics. He became a Protestant minister, and in 1706 he married Margarete Brucker, daughter of another minister.
They were, for the most part, artisans but the mathematician’s father, Paul Euler, graduated from the theological department of the University of Basel. His great-great-grandfather, Hans Georg Euler, had moved from Lindau, on the Bodensee ( Lake Constance).
Euler’s forebears settled in Basel at the end of the sixteenth century. Mathematics, mechanics, astronomy, physics.
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