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 First edition, rare, of this collection of 28 previously unpublished papers by Euler, the majority of which deal with topics in number theory (e.g., papers 3, 5, 7-11, 14, 19 – see the listing below), of which the most important is ‘Observationes circa divisionem..... 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

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

Leipzig & Berlin: B.G. Teubner & F. Deuticke, 1931-1937. First editions, and a fine complete set in the original printed wrappers, of all eight issues of these proceedings to which Gödel contributed thirteen important papers and remarks on the foundations of logic and mathematics. The last three issues are particularly..... More
Item #4846

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: H. Estienne & W. Hopyl, 27 June 1503. First edition of this very rare collection of works, in an attractive Roger Payne binding. The individual works are all first editions with the exception of Lefèvre’s Epitome of Boethius’ De arithmetica (first, 1496) and an unattributed Opusculum de p[r]axi numerorum..... More
Item #3866