Great scientists（Period 3 Listening and Speaking）
in his effort to replace synthetic methods by analytic ones, euler was succeeded by j.-l.lagrange.but, where euler had delighted in special concrete cases, lagrange sought for abstract generality; and, while euler incautiously manipulated divergent series, lagrange attempted to establish infinite processes upon a sound basis.thus it is that euler and lagrange together are regarded as the greatest mathematicians of the 18th century; but euler has never been excelled either in productivity or in the skillful and imaginative use of algorithmic devices (i.e., computational procedures) for solving problems.carl linnaeus(born may 23, 1707, r shult, sm land, swed. died jan.10, 1778, uppsala )carl linnaeus is a swedish botanist and explorer who was the first to frame principles for defining genera and species of organisms and to create a uniform system for naming them.linnaeus was the son of a curate.his love of flowers developed at an early age; when only eight years old he was nicknamed“the little botanist.”he studied at the universities of lund and uppsala and received his degree in medicine from the latter.
the systema naturae, which linnaeus had shown to the botanist jan fredrik gronovius in manuscript, so impressed gronovius that he published it at his own expense.linnaeus’ system was based mainly on flower parts, which tend to remain unchanged during the course of evolution. although artificial, as linnaeus himself recognized, such a system had the supreme merit of enabling students rapidly to place a plant in a named category.it came into use at a period when the richness of the world’s vegetation was being discovered at a rate that outstripped more leisurely methods of investigation.so successful was his method in practice that its very ease of application proved to be the greatest obstacle to its replacement by the more natural systems that superseded it.
his later years were taken up by teaching and the preparation of other works: flora suecica (1745) and fauna suecica (1746); two volumes of observations made during the journeys in weden, v stg ta resa (1747) and sk nska resa (1751); hortus upsaliensis (1748); his philosophia botanica (1751); and the important species plantarum (1753), in which the specific names are fully set forth.in 1755 he declined an invitation from the king of spain to settle in that country with a liberal salary and full liberty of conscience.in 1761 he was granted a swedish patent of nobility, antedated to 1757, from which time he was styled carl von linné.an apoplectic attack in 1774 left him greatly weakened, and he died four years later.