Euler's Correspondence with Giovanni Jacopo Marinoni

Euler wrote to Giovanni Marinoni, an Italian mathematician and engineer who lived in Vienna and was Court Astronomer in the court of Kaiser Leopold I. The Euler-Marinoni correspondence is of interest in part because it was to Marinoni that Euler first wrote about the famous Konigsberg bridge problem.

This quote was taken from a translation of OO1468 that appeared in an article by Hopkins and Wilson in the College Mathematics Journal (May 2004).

A problem was posed to me about an island in the city of Konigsberg, surrounded by a river spanned by seven bridges, and I was asked whether someone could traverse the separate bridges in a connected walk in such a way that each bridge is crossed only once. I was informed that hitherto no-one had demonstrated the possibility of doing this, or shown that it is impossible. This question is so banal, but seemed to me worthy of attention in that geometry, nor algebra, nor even the art of counting was sufficient to solve it. In view of this, it occurred to me to wonder whether it belonged to the geometry of position [geometriam Situs], which Leibniz had once so much longed for. And so, after some deliberation, I obtained a simple, yet completely established, rule with whose help one can immediately decide for all examples of this kind, with any number of bridges in any arrangement, whether such a round trip is possible, or not . . .

(Visit the Colleagues and Contemporaries page for more information about the people in Euler's life.)


Publication Information: List of all known correspondence (22 letters total):
OO1467 Marinoni to Euler 16 December, 1735
OO1468 Euler to Marinoni 13 March, 1736
OO1469 Marinoni to Euler 12 September, 1736
OO1470 Euler to Marinoni 17 November, 1736
OO1471 Marinoni to Euler undated, 1736
OO1472 Euler to Marinoni 12 July, 1740
OO1473 Marinoni to Euler 01 January, 1741
OO1474 Marinoni to Euler 08 June, 1746
OO1475 Marinoni to Euler 08 September, 1746
OO1476 Marinoni to Euler 31 December, 1746
OO1477 Marinoni to Euler 29 March, 1747
OO1478 Marinoni to Euler 13 May, 1747
OO1479 Marinoni to Euler 08 November, 1747
OO1480 Marinoni to Euler 18 September, 1748
OO1481 Marinoni to Euler 26 October, 1748
OO1482 Marinoni to Euler 19 February, 1749
OO1483 Euler to Marinoni 15 March, 1749
OO1484 Marinoni to Euler 11 June, 1749
OO1485 Marinoni to Euler 28 July, 1749
OO1486 Marinoni to Euler 12 November, 1749
OO1487 Marinoni to Euler 03 January, 1750
OO1488 Marinoni to Euler 31 August, 1751


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