Background
Nicolas Fuss was born on January 29, 1755, in Basel, Switzerland. He was born into a Swiss family of modest means.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Eloge-Monsieur-Leonard-Euler-LAcademie/dp/116542357X/?tag=prabook0b-20
1783
educator mathematician scientist
Nicolas Fuss was born on January 29, 1755, in Basel, Switzerland. He was born into a Swiss family of modest means.
Nicolas' mathematical abilities, which manifested themselves quite early, attracted the attention of a number of prominent scholars, including Daniel Bernoulli, who in 1772 recommended him to Euler, then living in Russia, as a secretary. Fuss arrived in St. Petersburg at the age of seventeen and spent the rest of his life in Russia.
Fuss wrote his first papers, which had purely practical goals, under Euler’s direct guidance. These were Instruction détaillée pour porter les lunettes and Éclaircissemens sur les établissemens publics en faveur tant des veuves. The latter concerns problems of the insurance business.
In January 1776, Fuss was selected as a junior scientific assistant of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences. In February 1783, he became an academician in higher mathematics. And from September 1800 until his death he was the academy’s permanent secretary.
The majority of Fuss’s writings contain solutions to problems raised in Euler’s works. They deal with several branches of mathematics and with mechanics, astronomy, and geodesy. From 1774 more than 100 of his articles appeared in the publications of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences.
Fuss’s best papers deal with spherical geometry, the problems of which he worked out with the St. Petersburg academicians A. J. Lexell and F. T. Schubert. In his first paper on spherical geometry, which was published in Nova acta Academiae scientiarum imperialis Petropolitanae in 1788, he gave solutions to three new problems concerning spherical triangles which are constructed on a given base, between two given great circles, and satisfy certain extremal conditions. In another article, the characteristics of a spherical ellipse, i.e., of the geometrical locus of the vertexes of spherical triangles with a given base and a sum of two other sides, are studied in detail.
Fuss was also responsible for new solutions to a number of difficult problems in elementary geometry. These included Apollonius’ problem of constructing a circle tangent to three given circles and Cramer’s problem - which generalizes Pappus’ problem - of inscribing a triangle inside a given circle, such that the sides of the triangle, or their extensions, pass through three given points.
In differential geometry Fuss solved a number of problems concerning the determination of the properties of curves which are defined by certain relationships between the radius of curvature, the radius vector, and the length of an arc. These papers partially bordered on so-called intrinsic geometry, which was developed into an independent mathematical discipline by Ernesto Cesàro and others at the end of the nineteenth century.
Fuss also did much in the field of education. He taught for many years at the military and naval cadet academies. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, he was active in the reform of the Russian national education system. He compiled a number of textbooks, including Leçons de géométrie à l’usage du Corps impérial des cadets, Foundations of Plane Trigonometry, Higher Geometry, and Differential and Integral Calculus, and Fundamentals of Pure Mathematics. These textbooks show the influence of all of Euler’s work, especially his Vollständige Anleitung zur Algebra, which Fuss used as a model in compiling a handbook for the cadet corps and the first algebra textbook for Russian Gymnasiums.
Nicolas Fuss was an eminent mathematician. He contributed to spherical trigonometry, differential equations, the optics of microscopes and telescopes, differential geometry, and actuarial science. He also contributed to Euclidean geometry, including the problem of Apollonius. In 1778 the Paris Academy of Sciences awarded him a prize for his astronomical paper Recherche sur le dérangement d’une cométe qui passe prés d’une planète. In 1798 a prize was awarded to him by the Danish Society of Sciences for his paper Versuch einer Theorie des Widerstandes zwei-und vierrädiger Wagen.
Fuss was an honorary member of the Berlin, Swedish, American and Danish academies.
Nicolas Fuss was married to Albertine Benedikte Philippine Luise Euler.
