As Samuel Johnson said in his famous epitaph on his Irish-born and educated friend, Goldsmith ornamented whatever he touched with his pen. A professional writer who died in his prime, Goldsmith wrote the best comedy of his day, She Stoops to Conquer (1773). Amongst a plethora of other fine works, he also wrote The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), which, despite major plot inconsistencies and the intrusion of poems, essays, tales, and lectures apparently foreign to its central concerns, remains one of the most engaging fictional works in English. One reason for its appeal is the character of the narrator, Dr. Primrose, who is at once a slightly absurd pedant, an impatient traditional father of… teenagers, a Job-like figure heroically facing life's blows, and an alertly curious, helpful, loving person. Another reason is Goldsmith's own mixture of delight and amused condescension (analogous to, though not identical with, Laurence Sterne's in Tristram Shandy and Johnson's in Rasselas, both contemporaneous) as he looks at the vicar and his domestic group, fit representatives of a ludicrous but workable world. Never married and always facing financial problems, he died in London and was buried in Temple Churchyard.
Leonhard Euler was one of the most prolific mathematicians of all time, amassing nearly 900 publications over the course of his lifetime. Born in Basel, Switzerland, Euler spent substantial amounts of time promoting mathematics at the courts of Berlin and St. Petersburg. Euler was adept at pure and applied mathematics. His textbooks on algebra and calculus became classics and for generations remained standard introductions to both subjects. He also made seminal advances in the theory of differential equations, number theory, mechanics, astronomy, hydraulics, and the calculus of variations. In 1738, Euler lost vision in one eye. In time, he became totally blind but continued to write. During… his life, Euler published more than 800 books, most of them in Latin. Euler died in 1783.