Daniel Bernoulli

Daniel Bernoulli was a Swiss mathematician and physicist belonging to the extraordinary Bernoulli mathematical dynasty. The son of Johann Bernoulli and close friend of Leonhard Euler, Daniel was originally pushed by his father to study medicine, but his innate mathematical genius quickly propelled him to the forefront of eighteenth-century mechanics.

In 1738, while working between the Saint Petersburg Academy and Basel, Bernoulli published his masterpiece Hydrodynamica. In this work, he formulated Bernoulli's principle: that an increase in the speed of a flowing fluid occurs simultaneously with a decrease in its static pressure or potential energy—the fundamental mechanism behind hydrodynamic flow, carburetors, and aerodynamic lift. Bernoulli also anticipated the kinetic theory of gases by over a century, demonstrating that gas pressure results from billions of microscopic particles colliding against container walls, and resolved the St. Petersburg paradox in probability theory.