Jacob Bernoulli

Jacob Bernoulli, who lived from 1655 to 1705, was a Swiss mathematician from Basel and a member of the Bernoulli family. At his father's wish he studied theology and entered the ministry, but against his parents' desires he also studied mathematics and astronomy, and from 1676 to 1682 he travelled through Europe learning from leading figures such as Johannes Hudde, Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke. He began teaching mechanics at the University of Basel in 1683 and is believed to have become its professor of mathematics in 1687, a post he kept for the rest of his life. An early proponent of the calculus of Leibniz, he and his brother Johann were among the founders of the calculus of variations. He discovered the fundamental constant e, and his most important contribution was in probability, where he derived the first version of the law of large numbers in his work Ars Conjectandi. In the Leibniz and Newton calculus controversy he sided with Leibniz.