Euler's explorations of extremal ellipses

Abstract

In the 1770s, Euler wrote a series of papers (E563, E691 and E692) about finding the ellipse with minimal area or perimeter in the family of all ellipses passing through a fixed set of points. This is a translation of all three papers from the original Latin, together with a commentary which discusses Euler's results and an appendix which addresses a question from E691 which Euler left for others to consider.