pronunciation of L'Hospital

[Math Is Hard]

LOH-pee-tahl or LOHS-pee-tahl?

Thanks! I have heard it both ways recently.

[lastlaugh]

Lo-Pih-tall

[selfAdjoint]

If it were modern French, it would be l'H\hat{o}pital with a circonflex, a little hat, over the o to denote the missing s. But even in the 17th century, the s was not pronounced. The only other language with spelling as weird as English is French.

[Math Is Hard]

Thanks for the info and explanation. Personally, I think we should just call it Bernoulli's Rule and be done with it! :)

[NSX]

There's a s in there?

[Math Is Hard]

According to my book, the name of the fellow who popularized the method was Marquis de L'Hospital. The rule was actually discovered by a Swiss mathematician named Johann Bernoulli. They cut some kind of a business deal where the Marquis bought the rights to Bernoulli's discoveries.

[Spectre5]

John Bernoulli was actually Marquis de l'Hospital's private tutor/teacher...their agreement (due to the large sum of money L'Hospital was paying Bernoulli) was that anything they discovered during their studies would be published and credited to L'Hospital. So, yes, Bernoulli acutally dicovered it, but L'Hospital was given credit for it.

[Njorl]

I don't think there is an "s" in L'Hopital.

Njorl

[Math Is Hard]

ummm.. James Stewart spells it that way in the standard textbook Calculus, 5th edition.
Not that I trust him completely, but it is a pretty widely used textbook, and I would figure his editors would go to the trouble of fact-checking on that.

I like your jumpsuit, but the way. Red is my favorite color.

[Muzza]

Njorl, http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/biography/LHospital.html


l'Hospital's name is commonly seen spelled both "l'Hospital" and "l'Hôpital" (e.g., Maurer 1981, p. 426), the two being equivalent in French spelling.