Daniel Bernoulli was born in Groningen, in the Netherlands, into a family of distinguished mathematicians.

The son of Johann Bernoulli (one of the "early developers" of calculus), nephew of Jakob Bernoulli (who was the first to discover the theory of probability), and older brother of Johann II, Daniel Bernoulli is said to have had a bad relationship with his father, Johann.

Upon both of them entering and tying for first place in a scientific contest at the University of Paris, Johann, unable to bear the "shame" of being compared as Daniel's equal, had banned Daniel from his house.

Johann Bernoulli also plagiarized some key ideas from Daniel's book Hydrodynamica in his own book Hydraulica that he backdated to before Hydrodynamica.

Despite Daniel's attempts at reconciliation, his father carries the grudge until his death.

When Daniel was seven, his younger brother Johann II Bernoulli was born.

Around schooling age, his father, Johann Bernoulli, had encouraged him to study business, there being poor rewards awaiting a mathematician.

However, Daniel had refused, because he wanted to study mathematics.

He later gave in to his father's wish and studied business.

His father had then asked him to study in medicine, and Daniel agreed under the condition that his father would teach him mathematics privately, which they continued for some time.

He is a contemporary and close friend of Leonhard Euler.

He goes to St. Petersburg in 1724 as professor of mathematics, but is unhappy here.

His earliest mathematical work is the Exercitationes (Mathematical Exercises), published in 1724 with the help of Goldbach.

In it, he expresses the numbers of the Fibonacci sequence in terms of the golden ratio.