Leiden: Ex officina Plantiniana apud Christophorum Raphelengium. Academiae Lugduno-Batavae Typographum, 1599. First Latin edition of Stevin’s extremely rare and important work on the determination of longitude using magnetic variation. Originally published in Dutch as De Havenvinding, “the [Latin] translation appeared almost simultaneously with the original Dutch version” (Crone et al...... More
Item #3954

Cologne: Johann Birkmann, 1562. First edition of this exceptionally rare, interesting, and notorious work – the second printed work on magnetism, preceded only by the Epistola de magnete of Peregrinus (1558) (which is virtually unobtainable). Taisnier’s work, in fact, contains a plagiarism of Peregrinus, which it reprints verbatim, and of... More
Item #4307

Edinburgh: Printed for the Society by Neill and Co., 1851. First edition, the extremely rare offprints, of these groundbreaking papers in which Kelvin outlined the view, as based on recent experiments by Joule and others, that “heat is not a substance [‘caloric’], but a dynamical form of mechanical effect; we..... More
Item #4028

Lancaster: American Physical Society, 1930. First edition, offprint issue, of this important paper which introduced the ‘Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process.’ Although its origins lay in statistical mechanics, this process has found a wide variety of applications, notably in mathematical finance. The Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process, also known as the ‘Langevin equation’ in the physics..... More
Item #3253

Amsterdam: Etienne Ledet et Compagnie, 1738. First edition, first issue, extremely rare large and thick paper copy, and in a beautiful contemporary binding, of Voltaire's only scientific work. “Owing to Descartes' great influence and Newton’s dispute with Leibnitz, the spread of his [Newton’s] thought on the continent took about fifty..... More
Item #4104