Messina: Pietro Spira, August 1558. First edition, ‘excessively rare’ (Sotheran), of this collection of works on ‘spherics’, the geometrical and trigonometrical techniques necessary for the description of the motion of the celestial bodies, including Maurolico’s Latin translations of works by four ancient Greek writers, Autolycus, Menelaus, Euclid and Theodosius, those..... More
Item #2881

Edinburgh; Padua: Andrew Hart; Giacomo Cadorino, 1619; [1667]. First edition, extremely rare, of this complement to Napier’s epoch-making Mirifici logorithmorum canonis descriptio (1614) – while the Descriptio gave the first ever table of logarithms, it was in the Constructio that Napier explained the method of their construction. It is here..... More
Item #4638

London: for Benjamin Motte, 1729. First edition in English of the Principia, the magnificent Jones-Macclesfield large paper copy in contemporary morocco; with its important provenance, this is surely the most desirable copy in private hands. The first edition was published in Latin in 1687 and “is generally described as the greatest..... More
Item #5105

London: printed by Augustine Mathewes, 1633. First edition of one of the most important works in the history of computing, the first printed description of the rectilinear slide rule. Invented by Oughtred about 1621, this was a calculating device based upon Napier’s recently invented logarithms for multiplying and dividing numbers..... More
Item #5318

Ferrara: Vittorio Baldini, 1587 [but 1586]. First edition, very rare, of Patrizi’s important work on the concept of ‘space’, which is “one of the most significant and important documents for the history of mathematical epistemology in the Renaissance, and might indeed almost be considered the turning point and dividing line..... More
Item #4856

Paris: Bachelier, 1835. First edition, presentation copy inscribed by Poisson to Marie Jean Pierre Flourens, of this classic work on the mathematical theory of heat conduction. “Poisson scored a point in this work by demonstrating how the conductibility of heat in the interior of bodies, far from being contained in..... More
Item #5242

Leiden: Ex officina Plantiniana apud Christophorum Raphelengium. Academiae Lugduno-Batavae Typographum, 1599. First Latin edition, extremely rare, of Stevin’s highly important work on the determination of position at sea using the magnetic variation (or declination) of the compass needle, the angle between magnetic north and true north; since latitude was simply..... More
Item #5421

Leiden: Bonaventure & Abraham Elzevier, 1646. First collected edition, rare, of the mathematical writings of François Viète (1540-1603), the greatest French mathematician of the sixteenth century, who was “the first extensively to use letters of the alphabet to represent numerical quantities” (Hutchinson’s Dictionary of Scientific Bibliography, p. 690), and “the..... More
Item #4931

Cambridge: at the University Press, 1910; 1912; 1913. First edition of this monumental work, one of the great rarities of modern science and mathematics, “the greatest single contribution to logic that has appeared in the two thousand years since Aristotle” (DNB). “In this monumental study of logic and set theory..... More
Item #5377