Basel: Impensis Thurnisiorum Fratum, 1713. First edition, an exceptionally fine copy, rare in this condition. “Jakob 1 Bernoulli’s posthumous treatise, edited by his nephew [Nicholas I Bernoulli], (the title literally means “the art of [dice] throwing”) was the first significant book on probability theory: it set forth the fundamental principles..... More
Item #4063

[Wien: K.K. Hof und Staatsdruckerei, 1868]. First edition, extremely rare offprint, of one of Boltzmann’s most important papers, in which he derives the ‘Boltzmann distribution,’ and formulates it as a probability distribution defined over phase space, instead of the space of molecular velocities – “This is the first occasion where..... More
Item #5812

London: Royal Society, 1888. First edition, journal issue in original printed wrappers, of Galton’s invention of the statistical concept of correlation, among the most fundamental and ubiquitous ideas in statistics. Stephen Stigler, the leading historian of statistics, has stressed that correlation did not emerge suddenly or in isolation, but represented..... More
Item #4698

Paris: Courcier; Huzard-Courcier, 1812-[1825]. First edition, very rare — especially when accompanied, as here, by all four supplements, the fourth of which is of extreme rarity — of the most influential work on probability and mathematical statistics ever written. Pierre-Simon Laplace’s Théorie analytique des probabilités, published at Paris by Veuve..... More
Item #6347

Paris: Jacque Quillau, 1708. First edition, first issue, very rare, of the first separately published textbook of probability. This issue has significant textual differences from what is usually referred to as the first edition. “In 1708 [Montmort] published his work on Chances, where with the courage of Columbus he revealed..... More
Item #4632

Paris: Bachelier, 1835. First edition of Quetelet's principal work in which he presented his conception of the homme moyen (“average man”) as the central value about which measurements of a human trait are grouped according to the normal distribution. “With Quetelet's work of 1835 a new era in statistics began..... More
Item #4841

Menasha, Wis. & New York: Published by the Society, 1947 [-1951]. First edition, journal issues in the original printed wrappers, of two of von Neumann’s major papers. “The 1947 paper by John von Neumann and Herman Goldstine, ‘Numerical Inverting of Matrices of High Order’ (Bulletin of the AMS, Nov. 1947)..... More
Item #5481

[Washington, DC: National Defense Research Council], 1942. Extremely rare first edition of this classic work which laid the foundations of modern communication and control theory. “It has been the opinion of many that Wiener will be remembered for his Extrapolation long after Cybernetics is forgotten. Indeed few computer-science students would..... More
Item #5179