St. Petersburg, Euler received and accepted an invitation to join the newly created Academy of Sciences there (1727). This first appointment carried with it a stipend, and the duties were the general promotion of science; subsequently Euler undertook more definite professorial work, but most of his energy during the whole of his career was devoted to writing mathematical papers, the majority of which were published by the St. Petersburg Academy. Though he took no part in politics, Russian autocracy appears to have been oppressive to him, reared as he had been among Swiss and Protestant surroundings; and in 1741 he accepted an invitation from Frederick the Great, a despot of a less pronounced type, to come to Berlin, and assist in reorganising the Academy of Sciences there. On being reproached one day by the Queen for his taciturn and melancholy demeanour, he justified his silence on the ground that he had just come from a country where speech was liable to lead to hanging;[1] but notwithstanding this frank criticism he remained on good terms with the Russian court, and continued to draw his stipend as a member of the St. Petersburg Academy and to contribute to its Transactions. Moreover, after 25 years spent at Berlin, he accepted a pressing invitation from the Empress Catherine II. and returned to Russia (1766).
He had lost the use of one eye in 1735, a disaster which called from him the remark that he would henceforward have less to distract him from his mathematics; the second eye went soon after his return to Russia, and with the exception of a short time during which an operation restored the partial use of one eye he remained blind till the end of his life. But this disability made little difference to his astounding scientific activity; and it was only after nearly 17 years of blindness that as a result of a fit of apoplexy "he ceased to live and to calculate" (1783).
Euler was probably the most versatile as well as the most prolific of mathematicians of all time. There is scarcely any branch of modern analysis to which he was not a large contributor, and his extraordinary powers of devising and applying methods of calculation were employed by him with great success in each of the existing branches of applied
- ↑ "C'est que je viens d'un pays où, quand on parle, on est pendu."
