Euler and the Knight's Tour | Chess history - Chessbase News

Leonhard Euler, the most prolific mathematician from the eighteenth century, made an enormous amount of contributions to a number of fields. 

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Even after losing his sight, he continued to publish relevant and long-standing works. The man from Basel also explored a problem related to chess, as he presented the first comprehensive mathematical analysis of the Knight's Tour.

As prolific as it gets
For mathematicians, physicists, astronomers and any scientist that uses pure mathematics in their day-to-day work, Leonhard Euler is nothing but a legend. Born in Basel in 1707, Euler was one of the two greatest mathematicians of the 18^th century. The other great from that era was Joseph-Louis Lagrange, who made great contributions from the analytic-method viewpoint. Euler's productivity is nevertheless unparalleled...

Euler's contribution 
As Ed Sandifer states in his paper How Euler did it, "Knight’s Tours are closely related to a kind of magic square called 'pandiagonal', and Euler wrote about pandiagonal magic
squares in 1779, when he wrote 'Recherches sur un nouvelle espèce de quarrés magiques' (Researches on a new kind of magic squares)".

However, as George Jelliss points out in his extensive recap of everything related to the study of Knight's Tours, Euler did not compose any 'Magic Knight's Tours' as has been stated repeatedly.
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Source: Chessbase News