Declaration

Our lieutenant general, L. Euler, issues, through our good offices, the following Declaration. He openly confesses:

…

III. that, although being the king of mathematicians, he will always blush over his offense against common sense and most ordinary knowledge, committed by deducing from his formulae that a body attracted by gravitational forces located at the center of a sphere, will suddenly reverse its direction at the center;

IV. that he will do his utmost not to let reason be betrayed by a wrong formula once more. He apologizes on his knees for once having postulated in view of a paradoxical result: “although it seems to contradict reality, we must trust our computations more than our good senses.”

V. that in the future he will no more compute sixty pages (of output) for a result, that one can deduce in ten lines after some careful deliberations; and if he once again pushes up his sleeves in order to compute for three days and three nights in a row, that he will spend a quarter of an hour before to think which principles (of computation) shall be most appropriate.

Excerpt from Voltaire’s “Diatribe du docteur Akakia,” (November 1752)