E140 -- Sur la vibration des cordes (Traduit du Latin)
(On the vibration of strings)
Summary:
According to C. G. J. Jacobi, a Latin treatise with the title: “De vibratione cordarum” was read to
the Berlin Academy on May 16, 1748 (see 1749, E119).
Publication:
-
Originally published in Memoires de l'academie des sciences de Berlin 4, 1750, pp. 69-85
-
Opera Omnia: Series 2, Volume 10, pp. 63 - 77
- According to Jacobi, the Latin original of the printed treatise
can be found in the archive of the Berlin Academy.
- A translation of selections of E140 is published in D. J. Struik's
A Source Book in Mathematics, 1200-1800 (1969, Harvard University Press), pp. 357-359. Struik's book
also includes a partial translation of E213 and
several papers of Bernoulli and D'Alembert, in a survery of their analyses of the motion of a vibrating string.
- A universally praised exposition of E140, along with many other papers of Euler, is Clifford Truesdell's
The Rational Mechanics of Flexible of Elastic Bodies (Opera Omnia, ser. II, vol. 11, part 2).
Documents Available:
- Original publication: E140
- E140 can be viewed or downloaded from Digitalisierte Akademieschriften und Schriften zur Geschichte der Königlich Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, which includes serial publications of the Prussian Academy of Science in the 18th and 19th Centuries.
- Professor Robert Bradley is currently translating E140, and his
translation will be available at the Euler Archive.
- The Euler Archive attempts to monitor current scholarship for articles and books that may be of interest to Euler Scholars. Selected references we have found that discuss or cite E140 include:
- Calinger R., “Leonhard Euler: The first St Petersburg years (1727-1741).” Historia Mathematica, 23 (2), pp. 121-166 (May 1996).
- Katz VJ., “The calculus of the trigonometric functions.” Historia Mathematica, 14 (4), pp. 311-324 (Nov 1987).
- Lutzen J., “Euler vision of a general partial-differential calculus for a generalized kind of functions.” Mathematics Magazine, 56 (5), pp. 299-306 (1983).
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