Leonhard Euler

Leonhard Euler (1707 to 1783) was a Swiss polymath, active as a mathematician, physicist, astronomer, logician, geographer, music theorist and engineer, who spent most of his adult life in Saint Petersburg and in Berlin. His place in computing rests on graph theory: his source credits him as the first to develop it, partly as a solution to the Seven Bridges of Königsberg problem, which he solved in 1735 by showing that no path can cross each bridge exactly once. The vocabulary of paths and traversals he opened is the ground on which later graph algorithms were built. He also introduced much of modern mathematical notation, including the notion of a mathematical function. This entry is the computing facet of a figure the atlas also holds in mathematics.