Jakob II Bernoulli

Jakob II Bernoulli was a Swiss physicist, born in Basel on 17 October 1759 and the younger brother of Johann III Bernoulli. He studied the humanities and then took a degree in law, but the early geometry lessons from his father, continued by his uncle Daniel Bernoulli, kept his taste for mathematics alive. At twenty-one he took over the duties of the chair of experimental physics from his ageing uncle. He later served as secretary to Count de Brenner, which let him travel through Germany and Italy; in Italy he befriended the Verona mathematician Lorgna, and he became a corresponding member of the royal society of Turin. Through the support of Nicolaus von Fuss he was admitted to the academy of St Petersburg, which named him one of its mathematical professors in 1788. Several of his papers appeared in the Nova Acta of the St Petersburg academy, the Acta Helvetica and the memoirs of the Berlin and Turin academies, and he also published juridical and physical theses and a German translation of a work by Merian. He drowned while bathing in the Neva on 3 July 1789, a few months after marrying a granddaughter of Leonhard Euler, and is counted among the last notable members of the Bernoulli family.