Daniel Bernoulli tied his father for a prize, and his father banned him
When Daniel Bernoulli shared first place with his father Johann in a Paris science contest, Johann reportedly threw him out of the house, unable to bear being matched. He is also accused of lifting ideas from his son's Hydrodynamica, the book behind the principle that explains aeroplane wings and carburettors.
Daniel Bernoulli was born in Groningen in 1700 into a Protestant family that had fled Spanish persecution in Antwerp and settled in Basel. His father Johann was an early developer of calculus and his uncle Jacob discovered the constant e. The historian W. W. Rouse Ball rated Daniel the ablest of the younger Bernoullis. Johann pushed him into business because mathematics paid poorly; Daniel agreed to study business and medicine only if his father taught him mathematics privately, and he earned a doctorate in anatomy and botany in 1721.
In 1724 he took a mathematics chair in St. Petersburg, where he befriended Leonhard Euler but was miserable. Illness, church censorship and pay disputes gave him reasons to leave in 1733, and he spent the rest of his career in Basel, holding chairs of medicine, metaphysics and natural philosophy in turn. The Royal Society elected him a Fellow in 1750. The feud with his father never healed, and Johann is said to have backdated his own Hydraulica to claim priority.
Hydrodynamica, published in 1738, derived its results from a single principle, conservation of vis viva, an early form of energy conservation. Bernoulli's principle, which relates the speed and pressure of a moving fluid, comes from it, as does the first sketch of the kinetic theory of gases, used to explain Boyle's law. He also found a root-finding method for polynomials in 1729, shared a French Academy prize for tidal theory with Euler and Colin Maclaurin, worked with Euler on the beam equation and stated the superposition principle for vibrations in 1753.
The same year as Hydrodynamica he tackled the St. Petersburg paradox, arguing that people maximise utility rather than money and that each extra coin matters less the richer you are, a foundation of the economics of risk aversion. In 1766 he analysed smallpox data to show that inoculation worked, an early study of censored statistics. He died in 1782.
Source: Daniel Bernoulli
