Gorgocutie Says:
This is the hierarchy of "having things named after you" taken to its logical extreme. Napoleon gets a country (well, an era of French history anyway), Queen Victoria gets an entire historical period (the Victorian Era — 1837-1901, all repressed corsets and industrial smog), and then Leonhard Euler gets the ultimate flex: an "era" named after him that sounds like a pun.
The joke is that Euler (pronounced "Oiler") is arguably the most prolific mathematician in history — he published more than 800 papers, basically invented modern graph theory (hello, Königsberg bridges), gave us e^(iπ) + 1 = 0 (Euler’s identity, often called the most beautiful equation), and contributed to everything from calculus to astronomy to mechanics. Yet ask the average person on the street "who was Euler?" and you’ll get blank stares.
So the meme goes: Napoleon → famous enough for a country. Victoria → famous enough for an era. Euler → so unknown outside his field that having an "Era of Euler" is simultaneously the highest honour and the most obscure flex in history. Also, "Euler" and "era" sound similar enough that the whole thing becomes a tongue-twister.
A mathematician so powerful he named a concept that sounds like what it is.
0 Comments