Euler's “Mistake”? The Radical Product Rule in Historical Perspective

ALBERTO A. MARTINEZ is a lecturer in the Department of History of the University of Texas at Austin. He earned his Ph.D. in history of science from the University of Minnesota in 2001. He researches and writes mainly about the history of special relativity. He wrote and rewrote the present paper while he was a Fellow of the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology at M.I.T. and an instructor at the California Institute of Technology. He has also written Negative Math (Princeton University Press, 2006), which features other odd controversies in the history of signed numbers.