Nicolas Fuss

Nicholas foot (also: Nicolaus foot, Nikolai foot); ( Born January 30, 1755 in Basel, Switzerland, † January 4, 1826 in Saint Petersburg, Russia) was a Swiss mathematician and secretary of Leonhard Euler.

The son of the carpenter Johann Heinrich foot made ​​first with his father as a carpenter and attended parallel to the magistrate Drawing School and the Municipal Gymnasium. From 1767 to 1772 he studied at the University of Basel Mathematics at Daniel Bernoulli.

In 1772 he succeeded Euler by its blindness to Saint Petersburg. He was for ten years secretary Euler and prepared on his behalf before about 250 work for printing. Later, he was a regular conference secretary of the St. Petersburg Academy and tried to get along with other Carl Friedrich Gauss to the Academy to Russia.

Foot dealt with problems of actuarial mathematics and trigonometry. In 1778 he won a prize from the French Academy of Sciences.

In 1823 he did not recognize the genius of Nikolai Ivanovich Lobatschewskis geometry textbook and wrote a negative opinion to do so.

In 1784 he married Leonhard Euler granddaughter Albertine († 1822), daughter of Johann Albrecht Euler. The couple had 13 children, of whom survived him by about half. Several sons also beat an academic career in Russia: Paul Henry (1798-1855) in 1826, his successor as professor of mathematics and as secretary of the Academy in St. Petersburg. George Albert ( 1806-54 ) was an astronomer and was according to various research trips in 1848 as Head of the Observatory at Wilna.