IAU Commission 41 : Meetings : Astronomical Archives Session


Edition of Leonhard Euler's Contributions on Perturbation Theory in the Context of the Euler-Edition

Andreas Verdun and Gerhard Beutler (Switzerland)

Leonhard Euler (1707 - 1783) was an outstanding scientist of the 18th century. Uncountable discoveries in the fields of Mathematics, Astronomy, and Physics are due to to him or have their origin in his works. Euler is considered one of the most productive scientists of all times, and he left behind an enormous work consisting of about 900 publications, about 3000 scientific letters, and numerous manuscripts and notebooks.

The Euler Committee of the Swiss Academy of Sciences started about 1907 with the edition of the Collected Works with the goal of making it available to the scientific community. The edition of Euler's printed works is close to completion today. There remain two volumes which will contain Euler's contributions on perturbation theory. We give an overview on the state of the Euler-Edition and present details concerning the editional works of the remaining two volumes. We focus on two aspects: the technical tasks of editing Euler's papers on perturbation theory, and the historiographical research related to these papers.

Authors' address: Astronomical Institute, University of Bern, Sidlerstrasse 5, CH-3012 Bern, Switzerland


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