1645-1705

The first member of his distinguished family to attain international notoriety, Jakob Bernoulli contributed greatly to mathematicians' understanding of calculus and probability theory. He maintained a correspondence with Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646-1716), and was one of the first scholars to fully grasp the latter's "infinitesimal calculus," as that branch of mathematics was then called.

The Bernoullis came from Holland, which at the time was controlled by Spain, and fled Spanish oppression, winding up in the Swiss town of Basel. Against his father's wishes, Jakob studied mathematics and astronomy, but it was in theology that he earned his degree in 1676, at age 31. He then went to work as a tutor in France, where he became acquainted with the writings of René Descartes (1596-1650), and in 1681 traveled to Holland and England, where he met physicist Robert Boyle (1627-1691).

Upon his return to Basel in 1682, Bernoulli established...