The legacy of Johann Bernoulli
Johann Bernoulli did not write a great book, as his brother wrote the Ars conjectandi or Newton the Principia. His most famous book came out under someone else’s name. What he left was a way of working: turning every problem of physics or geometry into an equation and solving it with Leibniz’s calculus. And he left pupils.
Leibniz’s champion In the dispute over who had invented the calculus, Newton or Leibniz, Johann was the most combative soldier on Leibniz’s side. When the Royal Society, presided over by Newton, published at the beginning of 1713 a report giving priority to Newton, Leibniz replied with an anonymous broadsheet, the Charta volans, which quoted the judgement of “an eminent mathematician”: it was Johann. In the years that followed, Johann challenged the English mathematicians with hard problems, which he thought impossible with Newton’s method. Leibniz died in 1716, and Johann carried on the fight alone for years. The dispute cut English mathematics off from that of the Continent for almost a century.
