Saturday, October 24, 2009

How do you pronounce 'Euler' ?

These last two weeks at school, we've been doing stuff like Euler's Number, Euler Graphs and Euler Circuits, which all came from Leonhard Paul Euler, who was a pioneering Swiss mathematician.


When I was doing my assignment on Euler Graphs, I noticed that whenever I typed in 'a Euler Circuit' in Microsoft Word, I was always getting that green squiggly line below the 'a' and Office suggested that I change it to 'an'...and well it got me thinking, since I pronounce Euler as 'youler'.


Normally, an English speaking person would pronounce the word like I do, 'youler', but apparently, it's pronounced 'oiler'; and that's why Microsoft Word was always complaining about it; because 'an "oiler" circuit' makes sense, but "a oiler circuit" doesn't.


So, bottom line...the word Euler is pronounced as OILER