Leonhard Euler Accomplishments

Growing up, my opinions of mathematics and poetry were polar opposites of each other. Completing my mathematics homework, I felt as though I was a machine just adding, subtracting, and dividing numbers to no end. If I were to prescribe a term to describe the piles of math homework assigned to me throughout my education years, it would be “rigorous.” Unlike mathematics, poetry appeared to be ramblings on a page stuck together with a skewer of imagination. There were no rules in the creation of poetry; it was only bound by the limits of my “creativity.” With preconceived notions of math being rigorous and poetry being creative, then how could the great mathematician think that poetry is rigorous and the great poet think that math is creative?

He made great contributions in many areas of mathematics and even developed new ones. Perhaps the most impressive feats of his career were discovering the mathematical constant e (Euler’s number) and finding the sum of all natural numbers to be negative one-twelfth. While these discoveries are now rudimentary in the field of mathematics, they were breakthroughs of the 18th century. But how did Euler make these discoveries? The current teachings of mathematics at the time did not indicate a possibility for these discoveries; however, through Euler’s ingenuity and creativity, he was able to make discoveries beyond the imagination of man at the time. Unlike computing 2+2 or finding the derivative of x to the second power, difficult mathematical problems have no easily discoverable answer. The our current system of math is limited and for a great mathematician to push these limits, he has to employ his imagination like Euler has. While a poet employs imagination in his projects, it isn’t his primary tool. As a child, I wrote poetry about snowmen running in a field of flowers and spacemen coming from the reaches of the galaxy to be my friend; yet, the poetry composed by great poets is nothing like this. Ezra Pound, considered one of the most influential poets of the twenty century, writes of a poetry that leaves the shores of the flowery, imaginative poetry we read and create as a child and is wrapped in the depression, cruelty, and mortality of life. One short poem of Pound’s that demonstrates his poetic style is