ABSTRACT
Professor of mathematics at the University of Groningen from 1695, and then at the University of Basel from 1705 as a successor to his brother Jakob (1654-1705). His main contributions are in the areas of infinitesimal calculus and mechanics. After the publication of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s (1646-1716) mémoires on the calculus, Bernoulli familiarized himself with the new infinitesimal techniques under the guidance of his older brother Jakob. His first outstanding contribution to the calculus was the determination in 1691 of the solution to the problem of the catenary, the shape of the curve formed by a chain hanging between two points. Bernoulli was able to show that the curve “depended on the quadrature of the hyperbola.” Other contributions to the calculus include the determination of the radius of curvature of a curve (also discovered by Jakob), the study of the integration of differential equations, and the development of the exponential calculus, which extends Leibniz’s differential calculus to curves of the form z=yx.
