Ernesto Cesàro Created 2026-10-13 Updated 2026-10-31
Figure 1.
Portrait of Ernesto Cesàro
. Historical photograph by an unknown photographer, originally reproduced by MacTutor. Listed as public domain by Wikimedia Commons. Source.
Leonhard Euler's 1751 correspondence already studied triangulations of a convex polygon and gave a closed formula for their counts. Johann Andreas von Segner supplied a combinatorial recurrence relation in a paper written in 1758. Eugène Charles Catalan's nineteenth-century work connected the formula to bracketed products. This history, documented in Igor Pak's account, shows how the same counting structure reappeared through different objects; the modern name alone does not establish discovery priority.[ref]