Euler's lute and Edwards' oud

Abstract

In a piece published in 1981, H. M. Edwards touts the benefits of reading the masters. A quarter-century later, Edwards takes seriously his own advice by publishing an encomium on Euler's Institutiones (1755). While we agree with Edwards that we shall all do well by studying the masters, we argue that to derive the full benefit, one must read historically important texts without interposing a lens formed by one's own mathematical accomplishments. We show, in particular, that Edwards misses much of the style and substance of Euler's Institutiones by reading the text through a constructivist lens.

9 pages, published online first in The Mathematical Intelligencer

References in corpus (4)

• Leibniz's Infinitesimals: Their Fictionality, Their Modern Implementations, And Their Foes From Berkeley To Russell And Beyond
• Who Gave you the Cauchy-Weierstrass Tale? The Dual History of Rigorous Calculus
• Almost equal: Method of adequality from Diophantus to Fermat and beyond
• Leibniz's Laws of Continuity and Homogeneity

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Interpreting the infinitesimal mathematics of Leibniz and Euler
• Cauchy's infinitesimals, his sum theorem, and foundational paradigms
• Cauchy, infinitesimals and ghosts of departed quantifiers
• Gregory's sixth operation
• Controversies in the foundations of analysis: Comments on Schubring's Conflicts
• The Mathematical Intelligencer flunks the Olympics
• Is Leibnizian calculus embeddable in first order logic?