Euler's 1760 paper on divergent series

That Euler was quite aware of the subtleties of assigning a sum to a divergent series is amply demonstrated in his paper De seriebus divergentibus which appeared in Novi commentarii academiae scientiarum Petropolitanae 5 (1754/55), 205–237 (= Opera Omnia (1) 14, 585–617) in the year 1760. The first half of this paper contains a detailed exposition of Euler's views which should be more readily accessible to the mathematical community.The authors present here a translation from Latin of the summary and first twelve sections of Euler's paper with some explanatory comments. The remainder of the paper, treating Wallis' hypergeometric series and other technical matter, is described briefly. Appended is a short bibliography of works concerning Euler which are available to the English-speaking reader.