Nicolaus I Bernoulli

Nicolaus I Bernoulli (1687 to 1759) was a Swiss mathematician, one of the many prominent mathematicians of the Bernoulli family. Born in Basel, the son of Nicolaus Bernoulli, a painter and alderman of the city, he graduated from the University of Basel under Jakob Bernoulli in 1704 and took his doctorate five years later with a thesis on probability theory in law, Dissertatio Inauguralis Mathematico-Juridica de Usu Artis Conjectandi in Jure. In 1716 he obtained the Galileo chair at the University of Padua, where he worked on differential equations and geometry, and in 1722 he returned to Switzerland to take a chair in logic at Basel. His uncle Jacob, an early developer of calculus and a pioneer of probability, and his cousin Daniel influenced him deeply, and his work in probability built on Jacob's Bernoulli numbers and Bernoulli theorem. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1714. Outside mathematics he enjoyed the arts, as his father did, and took pleasure in teaching and mentoring students.