Before a suspension bridge can hold morning traffic, before fluid dynamics can lift a plane, before encryption can secure your wallet, someone had to write the syntax that makes those calculations possible. Most of that syntax was standardized by one 18th-century Swiss polymath. This episode is a deep dive into Leonhard Euler, the man who built the mathematical alphabet of the modern world.

We trace his ascent from the University of Basel under Johann Bernoulli to the Imperial Russian Academy in St. Petersburg, his dozen turbulent years at Frederick the Great's Berlin Academy, and his eventual return to Russia under Catherine the Great. We unpack the notation we still use without thinking (e for the natural base, i for the imaginary unit, the modern use of f(x) for functions, sigma for sums) and the landmark results that anchored ent ...