Alternate Names
Bernoulli, Jacques; Bernoulli, James
Born Basel, Switzerland, 27 December 1654
Died Basel, Switzerland, 16 August 1705
Jacob Bernoulli was a member of a family of celebrated mathematicians and physicists; he was a prominent Cartesian. His father and grandfather were spice merchants, and his mother came from a prominent family of bankers and city councilors. He was sent to the University of Basel to study philosophy and theology, taking a degree in philosophy in 1671 and in theology in 1676. Against the wishes of his parents, he also studied mathematics and astronomy, and became the first of the mathematicians among the Bernoullis.
After graduation in 1676, Bernoulli first went to Geneva, then to Paris, where he studied with the followers of René Descartes under Nicolas Malebranche . Descartes had postulated a vast system of vortices, subtle particles that whirled endlessly around the Sun. This could explain the motion of the planets, and the properties of the vortex...
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Selected References
Bernoulli, Jakob (1969). Die Werke von Jakob Bernoulli, edited by J. O. Fleckenstein. Basel: Birkhäuser.
Fleckenstein, J. O. (1949). Johann und Jakob Bernoulli. Basel: Birkhäuser.
Hofmann, J. E. (1970). “Bernoulli, Jakob (Jacques) I.” In Dictionary of Scientific Biography, edited by Charles Coulston Gillispie Vol. 2, pp. 46–51. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
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Suzuki, J. (2014). Bernoulli, Jacob. In: Hockey, T., et al. Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-9917-7_141
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