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I'm afraid I'm not sure where you're differing from what I said! He invented graph theory to solve the riddle. It was later used to solve other problems as well
by n4r9 3y ago
I'm afraid I'm not sure where you're differing from what I said! He invented graph theory to solve the riddle. It was later used to solve other problems as well. It's not clear to me that Euler knew of the myriad possible applications, but would be happy to be shown wrong.
- lupire 3y ago"Inventing graph theory" is a tiny task. He just took a map and simplified the visual presentation. All the work of the theory comes after that one little problem. It wasn't a big journey like this thread starter is talking about. You can see it in the short paper, where most of the length is due to the lack of algebraic notation, and there's nothing there to generalize to answer other questions about graphs.
- n4r9 3y agoJust because the paper is short, doesn't mean that Euler didn't spend significant time and effort dreaming up the solution. If it was a tiny task, someone else would have done it already.