Let’s be clear: even if we are ascribing to the “great man” school of thought in history, rather than the “shoulders of giants” school, there were plenty of other epochs in the history of mathematics that already have adjectival versions, derived from the people who developed that new area of mathematics:
Pythagorean (Pythagoras)
Euclidean (Euclid)
Algorithmic (Al-Khwarizmi)
Newtonian (Newton)
Gaussian (Gauss)
Bayesian (Bayes)
So using Euler as a singular epoch to the exclusion of others’ contributions is not particularly useful, since other people have also developed entire branches of mathematics. What Euler did for discrete mathematics/graph theory, Newton and Leibniz did for calculus, Al-Khwarizmi did for algebra, Bayes did for statistics, and Euclid did for geometry.
I personally think you can’t disentangle any of them from their contemporaries and forebears, since they were, all of them, in constant communication, collaboration, and competition with one another. You don’t get the brilliance of Newtonian physics or calculus without Robert Hooke and Gottlieb Leibniz, and Bayesian statistics was largely developed by Laplace. Where is Peano in here, who formulated the axioms upon which all mathematics rests? The tusi couple anticipated Copernicus’ model of orbital mechanics hundreds of years before he and Kepler picked up pens, and is mathematically equivalent to an ellipse surrounding the sun, if you were to graph them all out on the same paper.
It’s not particularly meaningful to try to say that “so-and-so is the father of ______”, because it completely ignores and belittles the contributions of others upon whom each of these people relied, in favour of an easier-to-memorize history of old, dead white men who are the sole progenitors of civilisation.
Let’s be clear: even if we are ascribing to the “great man” school of thought in history, rather than the “shoulders of giants” school, there were plenty of other epochs in the history of mathematics that already have adjectival versions, derived from the people who developed that new area of mathematics:
So using Euler as a singular epoch to the exclusion of others’ contributions is not particularly useful, since other people have also developed entire branches of mathematics. What Euler did for discrete mathematics/graph theory, Newton and Leibniz did for calculus, Al-Khwarizmi did for algebra, Bayes did for statistics, and Euclid did for geometry.
I personally think you can’t disentangle any of them from their contemporaries and forebears, since they were, all of them, in constant communication, collaboration, and competition with one another. You don’t get the brilliance of Newtonian physics or calculus without Robert Hooke and Gottlieb Leibniz, and Bayesian statistics was largely developed by Laplace. Where is Peano in here, who formulated the axioms upon which all mathematics rests? The tusi couple anticipated Copernicus’ model of orbital mechanics hundreds of years before he and Kepler picked up pens, and is mathematically equivalent to an ellipse surrounding the sun, if you were to graph them all out on the same paper.
It’s not particularly meaningful to try to say that “so-and-so is the father of ______”, because it completely ignores and belittles the contributions of others upon whom each of these people relied, in favour of an easier-to-memorize history of old, dead white men who are the sole progenitors of civilisation.