WHEN the King of Prussia wanted a 30-metre-high water fountain to grace his palace gardens back in the 1700s, a bungling team spent a decade trying to make the dream come true, and failed miserably.
The blame for this grand failure has generally landed squarely on the shoulders of Leonhard Euler, a genius mathematician who helped with the project and is still famous today for his equations on fluid flow and spinning tops.
Historians say his grand theories fell apart when put to the practical test, and hold him up as a prime example of how theoreticians of the time…
