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Daniel Bernoulli was born into a family of mathematicians. His father and all of his brothers were all mathematicians. Bernoulli's father tried to force Bernoulli into a career as a merchant, somewhat strange since that is what Bernoulli's grandfather had tried to do to his father. Bernoulli resisted, though, and instead went to work in the sciences. Bernoulli learned the principles of energy and the conservation of energy from his father, and put them to use in his doctoral thesis on the mechanics of breathing. However, Bernoulli's real love was not in medicine, but in physics and math. Bernoulli received the chair of mathematics in St. Petersburg, and it is while he was there that he produced his most famous work. He published the book Hydrodynamica, on hydrodynamics. In this book, he gave the correct analysis of water flowing from a hole in a container (based on conservation of energy), discussed pumps, formulated the basic kinetic theory of gases, and presented Bernoulli's principle. This principle states that as the speed of a fluid increases, its pressure decreases. Bernoulli won the Grand prize of the Paris Academy several times, once jointly with his father. This caused a break in his father's relationship with him. His father, always jealous of his sons' accomplishments, considered the fact that Daniel had been ranked an equal to him a personal insult, and refused to see him again. Bernoulli's father even went as far as publishing the book Hydraulica, which was plagiarized from Hydrodynamica, and published afterwards. But Bernoulli's father wrote the publishing date of Hydraulica as one year before his son's book, thereby hoping to get the credit for his son's discoveries. |