Euler's map of the 7 Bridges of Königsberg

April 7, 2009 4:31 PM

Do you know good sources for historical mathematics images, specifically the Bridges of Königsberg by Leonhard Euler?

Hi all, Euler's map of the 7 Bridges of Königsberg, which were all to be crossed once without crossing any twice is considered to be the first directed graph in the history of mathematics. I am trying to find a high quality reproduction of it, preferably on the internet. Does anyone know where to find such a thing? I would especially like to find one that is close to the original, rather than a later redrawing. This is for some writing that I am doing on the history of mathematics. I did some searches on google books, but did not find a wonderful PDF. Unfortunately I am not a mathematician, so I am probably unaware of the best math websites. Thanks in advance for your thoughts.

posted by tnygard to Society & Culture (4 answers total)

Best answer: The Wikipedia entry has a link to a .pdf of Euler's original publication (in Latin), complete with his diagrams.
posted by CrunchyFrog at 4:35 PM on April 7, 2009 [1 favorite]

If you want an actual drawing of the city, rather than a simplified diagram, there's a picture in the excellent MacTutor History archive. (I'm not sure of the date of the drawing.)
posted by CrunchyFrog at 4:50 PM on April 7, 2009

You might also be interested in this book, given your subject: A History of Mathematical Notations. My copy's packed up right now, but I wouldn't be surprised if this had what you wanted.
posted by tractorfeed at 5:46 PM on April 7, 2009

You may also want to look into Tufte's books, he works from a lot of primary sources, and there are some good starts in his first, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.
posted by onalark at 6:40 AM on April 8, 2009