Florence: In officina Iuntarum, Bernardi filiorum, 1567. First edition, very rare, of the only surviving work of Hipparchus (c. 190-127 BC). “Even the most casual discussion of ancient astronomy will not fail to call Hipparchus of Nicaea in Bithynia ‘the greatest astronomer of antiquity’ (Otto Neugebauer, ‘Notes on Hipparchus,’ Astronomy..... More
Item #3643

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

First edition. 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... More
Item #2252

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

London: Printed by S[arah]. G[riffin]. and B[ennet]. G[riffin]. for Benjamin Tooke and Thomas Sawbridge, [1669]. First edition, first issue, extremely rare, of the first of Leybourn’s books on the subject. This issue has ‘dialling:’ in line 2 of the title and lacks imprint date; the more common (but still rare)..... More
Item #4610

Lyons: Jacob Marechal for Simon Vincent, 5 May 1517. Third edition, the first edited by the Lullist Bernard de Lavinheta (d. ca. 1530), of the Ars Magna, his greatest work, now recognised as perhaps the first work in computer science. “Lull invented an ‘art of finding truth’ which inspired Leibniz's... More
Item #4363

1743. Edinburgh: 5 February. Important autograph letter from the great Scottish mathematician Colin Maclaurin (1698-1746) discussing his most important work, Treatise of Fluxions (1742), “the earliest logical and systematic publication of the Newtonian methods. It stood as a model of rigor until the appearance of Cauchy’s Cours d’analyse in 1821”..... More
Item #3411

Florence: Giuseppe Cocchini, 1666 (dedication dated 14 July, 1667). First edition, first issue, a magnificent copy bound in contemporary Italian red morocco gilt, probably for presentation, of the only publication of the Accademia del Cimento, the first organisation founded for the sole purpose of making scientific experiments (the more common... More
Item #4707

Messina: Pietro Spira, 1558. First edition, ‘excessively rare’ (Sotheran, 1917), of Maurolico’s Latin translations of works on ‘sphaerics’ by four ancient Greek writers, Autolycus, Menelaus, Euclid and Theodosius, those of the first two authors constituting the first printed editions. Maurolico, one of the most original mathematicians of the 16th century..... More
Item #2881

Paris: J. Quilau, 1708. A fine copy, of the first separately published textbook of probability. “In 1708 [Montmort] published his work on Chances, where with the courage of Columbus he revealed a new world to mathematicians” (Todhunter, p. 78). “The Essay (1708) is the first published comprehensive text on probability... More
Item #3894

Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956. First edition of Nash’s most famous work in pure mathematics, his solution of “a deep philosophical problem concerning geometry”, first posed by Bernhard Riemann, “one of the most important pieces of mathematical analysis in this century” which “has completely changed the perspective on partial differential..... More
Item #3536

Cambridge; London: Typis Academicus; Benjamin Tooke, 1707. First edition of Newton’s treatise on algebra, or ‘universal arithmetic,’ his “most often read and republished mathematical work” (Whiteside). “Included are ‘Newton’s identities’ providing expressions for the sums of the ith powers of the roots of any polynomial equation, for any integer i...... More
Item #4639

Paris: Guillaume Desprez, 1659. First edition, extremely rare (one of about 120 copies printed), of one of Pascal’s most brilliant works. “Édition originale, extrêmement rare, de la dernière œuvre de Pascal, l’une des plus éclatantes de son génie” (Lucien Scheler in Tchemerzine, V, pp. 54-55). “Pascal devoted himself during 1658..... More
Item #4403