Daniel Bernoulli was among the first mathematicians to apply the laws of Newtonian mechanics to a wide variety of problems in physics. He was born in Switzerland to a large family, many of whom became well-known mathematicians, astronomers and scientists. He originally studied medicine and only began to concentrate on mathematics while he was at St. Petersburg (1725). He had however returned to Switzerland (Basle) by the time his most famous book, Hydrodynamica, was published (1733). Amongst other things, this work showed that the pressure of a fluid depends on its speed, (Bernoulli's principle) and introduced a primitive form of kinetic theory by relating pressure to the bombardment of tiny particles, and explaining how this would increase with a rise in temperature. Bernoulli also made notable contributions to probability theory, the theory of differential equations, and electrostatics. The breadth of this work attests to his reputation as one of the founders of classical mathematical physics.
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