St. Petersburg: Imperial Academy of Sciences, 1769-1771. First edition, and a very fine copy, of Euler’s rare work on optics, ‘widely known and important in the physics of the eighteenth century’ and which ‘laid the foundations of the calculation of optical systems’ (DSB). The first volume presents his general theory..... More
Item #3300

St. Petersburg: Academia Imperialis Scientiarum, 1783-85. First edition of this collection of 28 previously unpublished papers by Euler (listed below), of which the most important is ‘Observationes circa divisionem quadratorum per numeros primos’, which gives the first clear statement of the ‘law of quadratic reciprocity,’ called the ‘golden theorem’ by..... More
Item #3318

St. Petersburg: Typis Academiae, 1741. First edition of “one of Euler's most famous papers—the Königsberg bridge problem. It is often cited as the earliest paper in both topology and graph theory” (Euler Archive, E53). The city of Königsberg is situated on the River Pregel, across which seven bridges had been..... More
Item #4791

Paris: Firmin Didot, 1822. First edition of the first mathematical study of heat diffusion, the first major mathematization of a branch of physics outside mechanics. “This work marks an epoch in the history of both pure and applied mathematics. It is the source of all modern methods in mathematical physics..... More
Item #3841

Leipzig: Gerh. Fleischer, 1801. First edition, rare, of Gauss’ masterpiece, “a book that begins a new epoch in mathematics … Gauss ranks, together with Archimedes and Newton, as one of the greatest geniuses in the history of mathematics” (PMM). “Published when Gauss was just twenty-four, Disquisitiones arithmeticae revolutionized number theory..... More
Item #4572

Berlin: Königlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1828. First printing of what is now called the Gauss-Newton interpolation formula; which enables one to predict the value of a quantity given a finite number of observations. Gauss had lectured on the interpolation formula at Göttingen in 1812; his then student Encke attended Gauss’s..... More
Item #2983

Salem, Mass. Salem Press, 1886. First edition, very rare offprint issue. “One of Gibbs’ most famous papers was entitled ‘On Multiple Algebra.’ It was given as an ‘Address before the Section of Mathematics and Astronomy of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, by the Vice-President’ and was published..... More
Item #4433

London: printed by W. Bulmer [for the Royal Society], 1814. Very rare separately-paginated offprint of Herschel’s account of the ‘calculus of operations,’ which formed a major part of the programme of reform promoted by the group of Cambridge mathematicians (which included Babbage and Herschel) who called themselves the ‘Analytical Society.’..... More
Item #4283

Hamburg: Verlag des mathematischen Seminars, 1922. First edition, journal issue in the original printed wrappers, and a copy with excellent provenance, of the first major paper in the development of the ‘Hilbert programme,’ in which Hilbert put forward his proposal for a foundation for all of mathematics based on axiomatics and logic..... More
Item #4823

Königsberg: Leupold, 1885. First edition, very rare, of Hilbert’s inaugural dissertation at the University of Königsberg, ‘On the invariant properties of special binary forms, in particular the spherical functions,’ in which he began his study of invariant theory. This subject was at the forefront of mathematics in the second half..... More
Item #4944

Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1870. First edition, very rare, of “the book that established group theory as a subject in its own right in mathematics” (Gray, p. 149). “Jordan’s monumental work, Traité des Substitutions et des Équations algébriques, published in 1870, is a masterpiece of mathematical architecture. The beauty of the edifice..... More
Item #4912

Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1874. First edition, rare, of the doctoral thesis of “the greatest woman mathematician prior to the twentieth century” (DSB) and the first woman in Europe to obtain a doctorate in mathematics. The thesis contains what is now called the ‘Cauchy-Kowalevsky’ theorem on the existence of solutions of..... More
Item #4203

Paris: Duprat, 1802. A fine copy of this influential text, which according to Babbage was "so perfect that any comment was unnecassary". "In discussing with a friend the formation of a section of the British and Foreign Bible Society, a society which had the distribution of Bibles as its mission..... More
Item #2252