Lausanne & Geneve: Marcum-Michaelem Bosquet & Socios, 1744. First edition of “Euler’s most valuable contribution to mathematics in which he developed the concept of the calculus of variations” (Norman). “’This work displays an amount of mathematical genius seldom rivalled – Cajori. It may be said to have created the calculus..... More
Item #5857

St. Petersburg: Imperial Academy of Sciences, 1770. First edition in German, its language of composition, and first obtainable edition, of Euler’s ‘Complete instruction in algebra’, which takes the reader step-by-step from the basics, including negative and imaginary numbers, through to the solution of quadratic, cubic and biquadratic equations, and concluding..... More
Item #5122

Toulouse: Bernard Bosc, 1670. First edition of Fermat’s annotated edition of Diophantus’ Arithmetica. This is the first printing of Fermat’s contributions to the theory of numbers, of which he is the undisputed founder, including his famous statement of ‘Fermat’s last theorem.’ Since most of Fermat’s work in number theory remained..... More
Item #4489

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

Paris: Bachelier, 1846. First edition of Galois' collected mathematical works, for the most part previously unpublished. Their posthumous publication was due to Joseph Liouville, editor of the leading French journal on pure and applied mathematics. “There have been few mathematicians with personalities as engaging as that of Galois, who died..... More
Item #5255

Göttingen: Dieterich, 1818. First edition, very rare separately-paginated offprint, preceding the journal appearance in Commentationes Societatis Regiae Scientiarum Gottingensis (vol. 4, pp. 21-48) by two years. “In his first years at Göttingen, Gauss experienced a second upsurge of ideas and publications in various fields of mathematics. Among the latter were several..... More
Item #5312

New Haven: Tuttle, Morehouse & Taylor, 1881. First edition, first issue (see below), of this extremely rare pamphlet which “marks the beginning of modern vector analysis” (Crowe, p. 150). “Nearly all branches of classical physics and many areas of modern physics are now presented in the language of vectors, and..... More
Item #4853

Warsaw: Dziewulski, 1930. First edition, rare, and a fine copy in the original printed wrappers, of Herbrand’s doctoral dissertation, written in 1929 as a contribution to Hilbert’s programme. Bernays described Herbrand’s theorem as “the central theorem of predicate logic”, and van Heijenoort wrote that “[Frege’s] Begriffsschrift (1879), Löwenheim’s paper [‘Über..... More
Item #5040

Leipzig: Teubner, 1901. First complete publication, extremely rare offprint issue, of Hilbert’s famous and enormously influential address to the International Congress of Mathematicians at Paris in 1900 in which he set forth a list of twenty-three problems that he predicted would be of central importance to the advance of mathematics..... More
Item #5482

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

Paris; Paris: Veuve Desaint; de l’Imprimerie de la République, 1788; An V [1797]. An exceptional volume, in a fine contemporary binding, containing the first edition of Lagrange’s masterpiece, the Méchanique, “one of the outstanding landmarks in the history of both mathematics and mechanics” (Sarton, p. 470) and “perhaps the most..... More
Item #4300

Milan: Imprimerie Bernardoni de C. Rebeschini, 1902. First edition, very rare, of “Lebesgue’s great thèse” (Burkill, p. 484), describing his new theory of integration, now known as the ‘Lebesgue integral’. “The Lebesgue integral is one of the great achievements of modern real analysis” (Britannica). “It cannot be doubted that this..... More
Item #5821