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I and several others are in the process of translating one of Euler's papers from Latin to English, in particular the one that the Euler Archive lists as E36. In it Euler proves the Chinese Remainder Theorem, but my question is this:

In Section 1, Euler refers to two (presumably mathematicians) named in Latin as Lahirii and Sauwerii. The Latin is as follows:

Ita quadratorum magicorum constructio iam pridem ab arithmeticis est tradita; qua autem cum esset insufficiens maiora ingenia Lahirii et Sauwerii ad perficiendum requisivit.

We are reasonably confident that Lahirii refers to Philippe de La Hire as he did in fact work on magic squares (quadratorum magicorum), but we have no clue as to the identity of Sauwerii and can find no mention of a mathematician named Sawyer who worked on magic squares.

Does anyone know who this might refer to?

Benjamin
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2 Answers2

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The identity of Sauwerii can be found in a footnote of a publication of the first part of Commentationes arithmeticae. Specifically, here.

Euler is referring to a Joseph Sauveur, 1653-1716. More specifically, he is referring to Sauveur's paper Construction generale des quarres magiques (accents omitted), which appeared in Mem. de l'acad. d. sc. de Paris [academy of sciences of Paris], 1710, p. 92.

Newb
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    +1 Good detective work, Newb! The worth of this forum proves itself once again. (P.S. Unfortunately, Sauveur doesn't even have an entry at http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/Indexes/S.html.) – Tito Piezas III Jan 27 '14 at 23:31
  • @TitoPiezasIII Thanks! It appears that Sauveur is quite obscure; he doesn't have an entry in the Mathematics Genealogy Project, either. However, his Wikipedia page is quite extensive. It appears that his greatest impacts were in acoustics, allegedly more or less founding this field of study. So perhaps it makes sense that he's not chiefly thought of as a mathematician. – Newb Jan 27 '14 at 23:37
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There is also a reference to Sauveur in Sandifer's book, "The Early Mathematics of Leonhard Euler", in the chapter about E-36.

For a preview, see: http://books.google.com/books?id=CvBxLr_0uBQC&pg=PA351

Stemkoski
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