Personally, I struggled with Math in school. Faced with a math test, any math test, I froze, cried, banged my head against the desk, and ultimately gave up. I saw mathematics as an isolated “thing” to be conquered. You were either good at math, or you were not.

How little I knew, and how little I was taught, about true mathematics. More than numbers, factorials, and fractions, Mathematics is about relationships – of numbers: how they work with each other, work for us, against us, and can talk about any situation. There are mathematics of money, elections  government, science, music, agriculture, capitalism, socialism, any -ism. Math is language and structure: it is a bridge between all aspects of liberal art. Which leads us to the Bridges of Koenigsberg.

Leonhard Euler, a Swiss mathematician of the 18th C solved, sort of, the problem of the Seven Bridges of Koenigsberg (Russia, at the time). Koenigsberg had two islands connected by seven bridges. The problem is to decide whether it is possible to follow a path that crosses each bridge exactly once and returns to the starting point (touching every edge only once). Euler proved that a necessary condition for the existence of Eulerian circuits is that all vertices in the graph have an even degree, and stated without proof that connected graphs with all vertices of even degree have an Eulerian circuit. The bridges did not meet this condition and therefore, no solution could be found to the problem.

Yet, what this Eulerian circuit eventually did provide is the basis for modern topology , which has expanded into areas of quantum physics, cosmology, biology, computer networking, and computer programming. For example, the Eulerian cycle or path is used in CMOS circuit design to find an optimal logic gate layouts. For anyone wanting to read the paper outlining these paths in the original Latin, it can be found here.  English translations do exist. A good page on the history of topology is here.

Leonhard Euler was a fascinating individual in that he saw mathematics as something that infused all of life. Though his writings, he made applied mathematics accessible to the layman and his scholastic peers alike. An excellent and thorough biography, written by Walter Gautschi, can be downloaded in PDF form here. With a varied interest in all aspects of mathematics  (arithmetic, geometry, algebra, physics), music, anatomy, physiology, astronomy… he truly was a man of the “Enlightenment.”  While he was not a Freemason from what I can tell, he seemed to hold much regard for the idea of true science, and creating a better world for his fellow man: a Freemason’s true ideals, to be sure.