Nicolaus I Bernoulli

Nicholas I Bernoulli (born 10 Oktoberjul / October 20 1687greg in Basel, .. † November 29, 1759 in Basel) was a Swiss mathematician.

Family

He comes from the branched family of scholars Bernoulli and is a nephew of James I. Bernoulli and Johann Bernoulli. He is the cousin of Nicholas II Bernoulli, who worked in a similar field, but died early.

Life

In 1704 he made ​​his degree at the University of Basel under Jakob I Bernoulli and 5 years later he completed his doctorate on the application of probability theory in legal matters. 1716 he was appointed to the Galileo Chair to Padua, where he worked in the areas of differential equations and geometry. In 1722 he returned to Switzerland and took over the chair of logic at the University of Basel. Five times (1738, 1739, 1743, 1747 and 1755), he served as rector.

According to an estimate by Joachim Otto Fleckenstein he was a gifted, but not a productive mathematician. His most notable achievements are hidden in his correspondence, especially in the Pierre Remond de Mont Mort. Nicholas Bernoulli had in 1713 published the posthumous manuscript Ars conjectandi on probability theory of his uncle Jacob Bernoulli and above also conducted a correspondence with Mont Mort, the author of the first (on Jacob Bernoulli based ) textbook on probability theory, published 150 pages of this correspondence in its second edition in 1713 were. In these letters, the problem was discussed, which we now know as the St. Petersburg paradox, and with the then detail his cousin Daniel Bernoulli employed in St. Petersburg. In addition to Mont Mort he corresponded more with Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Leonhard Euler.