Nicolaus II Bernoulli

Nicolaus II Bernoulli was a Swiss mathematician of the Bernoulli family, born in Basel on 6 February 1695 and dead in Saint Petersburg on 9 August 1726. He was the son of Johann Bernoulli and the older brother of Daniel Bernoulli, whom he also taught mathematics. He studied mathematics and law at the University of Basel from the age of thirteen, took a master's degree in 1711 and a doctorate in law in 1715, and in 1719 succeeded Giovanni Poleni in the chair of mathematics at Padua. He worked mostly on curves, differential equations and probability, assisted his father in the priority disputes between Newton and Leibniz and between his father and Brook Taylor, and in 1720 posed the problem of reciprocal orthogonal trajectories as a challenge to the English Newtonians. Invited with Daniel to the new St. Petersburg Academy in 1725, he died of a fever within eight months.