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Getting Eulered | Slate Star Codex

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There is an apocryphal story about the visit of the great atheist philosopher Diderot to the Russian court. Diderot was quite the clever debater, and soon this scandalous new atheism thing was the talk of St. Petersburg. This offended reigning monarch Catherine the Great, who was a good Christian woman – (except for the affair with the horse) (if you’re not familiar with this story, “affair with the horse” should be taken in the most literal possible way) (the affair with the horse is totally legendary, but so is the rest of this story, so adding it in doesn’t make things any worse) – anyway, it offended Catherine the Great, so she asked legendary mathematician Leonhard Euler to publicly debunk and humiliate Diderot. Euler said, in a tone of absolute conviction: “Monsieur, (a+b^n)/n = x, therefore, God exists! What is your response to that?” and Diderot, “for whom algebra was like Chinese”, had no response. Thus was he publicly humiliated, all the Russian Christians got an excuse to be

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