Basel

Basel (Bâle) is located in northwestern Helvetia (Schweiz or Switzerland) on the Rhein (Rhin or Rhine) River. It has a metropolitan population of 486 thousand, with 165 thousand within the city.¹ The city is known for its pharmaceutical production and its old university (from 1460).

An old famous structure is the Spalen Gate (Spalentor, 1398). Notable modern buildings include the cylindrical Bank for International Settlements (Bank für Internationalen Zahlungsausgleich, 1977); the Lonza AG with its elongated hexagonal floor plan (1962); and the Basler Messeturm, a 32 story tower completed in 2003.²

The mathematicians Leonhard Euler, Jacob Bernoulli, Daniel Bernoulli and Johann Bernoulli were all born here. Jacob Bernoulli did his work here, with his most famous work published posthumously: Ars conjectandi (1713), in which he described the behavior for what are now called Bernoulli trials--long sequences of trials for which a positive outcome has a fixed probability; and his solution to the isopermetric problem--finding the curve of given length that encloses the greatest area (made public 1706).

External references

cityscape of kleinbasel (little Basel), Helvetia (Schweiz or Switzerland)

Footnotes

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_in_Switzerland, 2012 figure, accessed 9/13/2013. The metropolitan figure does not include suburbs in France and Deutschland (Germany).
2. emporis.com, accessed 11/21/2013.
3. John Stillwell, Mathematics and its History, 2nd ed. (Springer, 2002).