Leonhard Euler

In 1744 Leonhard Euler published a method for finding the curve that makes a quantity as small or as large as possible, founding the calculus of variations.

At a minimum the slope is zero. When you cannot solve for it directly, step downhill along the slope: gradient descent, the way every AI model learns by minimising its loss.

Explore next

• Derivatives and limits (CF001)
• Partial derivatives and gradients (CF002)
• Gradient descent and its variants (ML014)

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