London: printed for J. Mawman and sold by J. Booth, 1826. First edition of Babbage’s first substantial published work, the first thorough treatise on actuarial theory, complete with folding table of mortality statistics, generally considered the first reliable life table. It serves as an early example of the desire and..... More about A Comparative View of the various Institutions for the Assurance of Lives
Item #3302

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 of..... More about Ars conjectandi, opus posthumum. Accedit Tractatus de seriebus infinitis, et Epistola Gallicè...
Item #4063

An important autograph letter from Johann Bernoulli (1667-1748), then one of the elder scientific statesmen of Europe, and still one of its greatest mathematicians, to his gifted student Gabriel Cramer (1704-52), who despite his youth had been appointed to the chair of mathematics at Geneva the previous year, but was... More about Autograph letter signed, with important scientific content concerning the ‘vis viva’...
Item #4709

London: Taylor, 1851. A fine copy, in original wrappers, of Boole’s first paper probability. The ideas he put forth in this work were later developed and included in his famous Laws of Thought (1854). “This seems to have been the first mention, by any author, of the close connection, both..... More about On the Theory of Probabilities, and in particular on Mitchell's Problem of the Distribution of...
Item #2974

London: Royal Society, 1888. First edition, journal issue in original printed wrappers, of Galton’s invention of the statistical concept of correlation, one of the most “fundamental and ubiquitous” ideas in statistics (Stigler, p. 73). “Like all major scientific discoveries, correlation did not appear in a vacuum. It was a concluding..... More about Co-relations and their measurement, chiefly from anthropometric data
Item #4698

Paris: Courcier, 1816. A fine uncut copy of his influential text book on probability - beeing the first exposition of Laplace's 'Théorie analytique des probabilités' (see Landmark Writings in Western Mathematics, p.339). 8vo (213 x 140 mm). VIII, 299, (3: errata) pp. Original interims-brochur, spine heavely worn but with no... More about Traité élémentaire du calcul des probabilités
Item #2025

London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1876. First edition, rare on the market in this condition, of Maxwell's textbook on dynamics, “a masterpiece of natural philosophy, notable especially for introducing into physics the term relativity in a passage that combines strenuous scientific insight with a mystical awareness … [It] had... More about Matter and Motion
Item #3849

London: W[illiam]. Pearson for the Author, 1718. First edition, and an unusually fine copy without any restoration, of this classic on the theory of probability, the first original work on the subject in English. “De Moivre’s book on chances is considered the foundation for the field of probability and statistics”..... More about The Doctrine of Chances: or, A Method of Calculating the Probability of Events in Play
Item #4637

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 about Essay d'Analyse sur les Jeux de Hazard
Item #4632

New York: American Telephone and Telegraph Company, 1948. First edition, the rare offprint, of “the most famous work in the history of communication theory” (Origins of Cyberspace). “Probably no single work in this century has more profoundly altered man's understanding of communication than C. E. Shannon’s article, ‘A mathematical theory..... More about A Mathematical Theory of Communication. Offprint from Bell System Technical Journal, Vol. 27...
Item #4656