Mathematische Werke

Abstract

VERSATILITY is the most delusive of the fairy gifts ; the men of genius on whom it was bestowed otherwise than in subtle malevolence can be counted on the fingers. In the age of Euler himself, Johann Heinrich Lambert shone by his own light, not as a reflexion of the great luminary, and had he consented to be only a mathematician, the course of mathematical history would have been different. But condemned by the humiliations of his early life to demand intellectual submission from everyone he met, Lambert could not bear the thought that there were branches of learning of which he was not a master, or stimuli to which his mind did not respond. Asked by the King of Prussia, "What do you know?" he answered, "Everything, sire" ; and to the further question, "How did you learn?", the reply was, "I taught myself". His contemporaries were duly impressed by the range of his knowledge, and if the solipsistic manner of which we are told suggests that he often knew that he was relying on a bluff which might easily be called, his portrait, which we can study for ourselves, suggests that he thoroughly enjoyed the sensation of carrying off the bluff.

Mathematische Werke

Johann Heinrich Lambert. Band 1: Arithmetik, Algebra und Analysis, 1. Herausgegeben von Andreas Speiser. Pp. xxxi + 358. (Zürich: Orell Füssli, 1946.) 25 Swiss francs.