Images of Italian Mathematics in France: The Latin sisters, from Risorgimento to fascism, by Frédéric Brechenmacher et al. (eds)

Abstract

lin Academy and a paper of 1760 not published until 1766 by the Petersburg Imperial Academy. Articles of Lagrange began in 1762 with his Essai d’une nouvelle m ethode, which recognized the contributions of Bernoulli and Euler. It appeared in theMiscellanea Taurinensia. To be sure that Lagrange received credit for his innovation, Euler did not publish on the subject for another four years. At the close of the book we see Lagrange returning in part to his d-calculus with a paper Sur la m ethode des variations in the 1769 Miscellanea Taurunensia and later treatises. A 1771 memoir by Euler gave a new definition of variation and a necessary condition for a variational integral to be a minimizer or maximizer. The book ends with more recent studies of equilibrium equations, known as Euler–Lagrange equations, for finding minima in variational integrals and with constraints on variational problems.