The course will follow the wonderous journey of Euler’s and Maupertuis’ independent discoveries of the 18th century and show how their work provided the insights vital to the modern understanding of the Quantum Universe. Feynman, Dirac, and others made Nobel Prize-winning discoveries enabled by the prophetic insights of Euler and Maupertuis.

Leonhard Euler was one of the most eminent mathematicians of the 18th century and is held to be one of the greatest in history. His contributions include exposing the properties of “Euler’s Number” a second transcendental number to pi. He combined them into “Euler’s Equation” that is recognized today as key to using quantum physics. Feynman called this equation “our jewel”.

Pierre-Louis Maupertuis was also an important scientists and original thinker of the 18th century. His greatest contribution to science is the ‘Principle of Least Action’. His work was largely ignored until rediscovered in modern times when it was needed to explain the strange motion of quantum particles.

Together, Euler and Maupertuis provide the tools destined to describe a marvelous world where particles appear to sniff out their path in advance; where “imaginary” numbers exist and describe the behavior of a particle in the form of its matter wave; where particles are waves until observed and certainty of location is replaced by probabilities—a vast, counterintuitive, quantum universe largely undiscovered.