How does your GPS work? Your high-speed internet connection? How does anyone measure star flicker? What is the lunar position at anyone time? Any of these questions about astral bodies—ask Euler. Pick up the newspaper and turn to the business section—economic models, optimization techniques, all Euler. Finances not your thing? Try the game pages, here’s some sudoku, courtesy of Euler’s probability theory! The list seems endless. This is something Thomas Zurbuchen wants you to know. And he should know.

Swiss-born Thomas Zurbuchen, a rising star of astrophysics and a Professor of Space Science and Aerospace Engineering at the University of Michigan is the most ardent apologist for the life and works of Leonhard Euler these days. The two men, though three centuries apart, have a few traits in common: both Swiss (Euler from Basel, Zurbuchen out of Bern); they both found fame and recognition outside of their native countries, Euler by appointment to the Imperial Academies of St. Petersburg and Berlin, and Zurbuchen not so long ago being awarded the prestigious Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers here in the U.S.; and both were sons of Calvinist ministers.

“We have similar backgrounds in the sense that we both have fathers who were ministers, very passionate, very traditional and very conservative religious people. I would say I've ended up closer on Einstein's side than Euler's side.  I much more strongly relate to the excitement of nature and order and God, more so than any specific church or religion.”

Speaking of Einstein, Zurbuchen also went to the same university (the University of Bern) as the 20th century’s most beloved physicist, whom he  has great affinity for:

“I did a set of talks on Einstein in 2005 and its really interesting to see the difference between Euler and Einstein.  Both are religious, though Einstein certainly not in the sense of being a devout religious person who goes to Church or Synagogue.  But he's a person who has an appreciation for a greater power that creates nature and order in a sense that is almost inexplicable in which he sees the "might of God" as he says.”

Euler who was contemporaries with the great Enlightenment thinkers such as Lessing and Voltaire at San Souci, the court of Frederick the Great—incurred the displeasure of that monarch, who had gathered about him the great minds of Europe in the hopes of glittering sophistry and repartee. However, Euler’s brilliance lay not in his worldliness but rather his Calvinist work ethic.
“I do believe that this sort of Calvinist ethic, the sheer commitment to doing the work, not backing off, has really helped him in many ways, just the sheer volume of the work that Euler did and thus the many connection points to our lives today, but also in one single lifetime—”
Euler’s output ranked as prodigious.  In his lifetime he accomplished over seventy volumes of work. Even blindness did not deter him, when his sight failed he dictated a volume of algebra to his manservant, a tailor’s apprentice, with no prior propensity for math.

On the money: Euler honored with a Swiss banknote

Soviet homage to Euler (1957)

Zurbuchen, whose primary focus is solar physics, is intrigued by the invisible forces that fuel the scientific mind, especially religion—given his own experience:
“I think often about the interaction between religion and science.  Religion can do two things—it can get an excitement in God as the Creator, however he did it—whether through a process of evolution or through saying something is just there—it can get that sort of excitement that can motivate in all the study of science and really become committed. This is the positive way.  It can also do the opposite and say 'We have understood the glory of the Lord and we don't need to do anything about it because all we need to know is in the bible...’ I strongly reject the latter, and so did Euler.”

Back to the similarities.  Both are family men, Euler who sired thirteen children, liked nothing better than bouncing babies on his knees while balancing equations—Zurbuchen opted for a nuclear family, but is all about fun with the kids. At an early stage in his career, Euler was invited to the Imperial Russian Academy of Sciences.  However the day he got there, Catherine I, his benefactress died. In her stead was a new regime of Russian aristocrats who weren’t so hot on the influx of foreign scientists. So Euler found a way to be useful by enlisting in the Russian navy—this lay the foundation for his seminal work in naval architecture, ballistics and hydraulics. In Zurbuchen’s case he’s responsible for calibrating and analyzing the data on a number of NASA’s satellites (some of which he helped build) and spacecrafts. One such device is the The Fast Imaging Plasma Spectrometer (FIPS) currently aboard the MESSENGER spacecraft and should be transmitting plasma readings from Mercury to us as early as 2008.  Space travel and the innovations spawned by it is something Zurbuchen is extremely invested in:
“My PhD is in astrophysics and the two things that have always excited me about work are exploration and innovation. Exploration is a human urge. For me exploration of nature has two goals, the first one is to broaden our horizon—we're much better people for knowing what we have on earth, for understanding how big the universe is,  and that has changed our view of it.”

Zurbuchen (r) with colleague(l) and FIPS

He is also the chair of the Student Entrepreneurship effort recently started by the University of Michigan to enhance student innovation within the engineering curriculum. He finds inspiration from his patron saints, Euler and Einstein in their unique approaches to problem solving, the engineering directions and technologies they spawned by entirely new ways of thinking about the world. Along with the Entrepreneurship program and the University’s Phoenix Energy Institute, Zurbuchen gets to tackle some of our most pressing contemporary issues—
“For example we've made a big mess out of our atmosphere, we have enormous gradients in income and poverty and we're relying on energy sources that are unhealthy for us in the long run. So if we could just ‘look under the hood’ many of these problems are related to engineering—and that's unbelievably exciting.“

One fundamental task is dealing with energy related crisis in a complex economy. Zurbuchen thinks of most of the problem ("the lowest hanging fruit") as almost sociological or psychological: we could save energy, why don't we? Much of the research investigates energy storage, for example concentrations of solar light onto solar cells to make a more efficient battery, for starters. Other priorities are alternative energy sources to be deployed in more developing regions.
“What's important about this is to recognize that the solution relates to two major issues which are dominating overarching themes for future technology. The first is to minimize or eliminate the carbon imprint. The second is sustainability. Those two principles will be key in any future supply.”
He is keenly aware of being in Michigan— the state suffering the most from the down turn of the automotive industry.
“I think that solar energy has an important role in this, but it would be a mistake to think of it as the only solution—I think what we're going to see is a diversification of energy sources.”

With these looming environmental and economic issues, the idea of space travel seems like a colossal expenditure—but Zurbuchen argues that it is necessary.
“Going to space is absolutely important right now in the context of understanding the earth. Also in terms of implementing some of these carbon trace adjustments as we go forward in dealing with our changing planet as one system.”

He argues further that many of the key tools we use today are spin-off technologies from the Apollo program—thermometers, GPS, computing and time-keeping devices—
“ I think that really forward looking, innovative exploration in space and elsewhere are the best triggers of human inspiration and innovation and to provide the tools that really change life on earth.”

So here’s another conundrum: how do you get a rocket to launch from  earth to the moon? Interestingly enough, Euler already answered this question in 1772 when he solved the “restricted three-body problem” for the French Academy Prize. With his understanding of elliptical functions, he charted the path of a “body” (or mass) caught in the gravitational pull of two larger masses. This is celestial mechanics 101, it holds the keys to understanding orbits and approximating the motion of an apollo spacecraft in the force field of the Earth and the Moon. And Zurbuchen would know.

For more about Euler and Zurbuchen visit:

Leonhard Euler's Wikipedia Entry
The Euler Archive
The Solar and Heliospheric Research Group
The Michigan Memorial Phoenix Energy Institute

NEXT:  We will be featuring a multimedia presentation based on Zurbuchen’s Euler and Space Travel: 300 Years in the Making stay tuned.