Venice: Domenico Louvisa; Gabriel Hertz & Giovanni Manfrè, 1724-27. Sammelband of four very rare works, all first editions, representing the work of the great Swiss mathematician Daniel Bernoulli, and of those of his friends and adversaries, during the period 1723-25 he spent in Italy. Bernoulli’s Exercitationes is his first mathematical..... More
Item #5535

Bologna: Giacomo Monti, 1647. First edition, rare, of Cavalieri’s second work on integration methods, a sequel to and elaboration of his Geometria indivisibilibus (1635), one of the most important forerunners of the integral calculus. Cavalieri’s ‘method of indivisibles’, considers an area as made up of an indefinite number of equidistant..... More
Item #5536

Milan: Lodovico Monza, 1678. First edition, rare, of Ceva’s first and most important book. “Ceva’s most important mathematical work is De lineis rectis (Milan, 1678), dedicated to Ferdinando Carlo. Chasles mentions it with praise in his Aperçu historique. In this work Ceva used the properties of the center of gravity..... More
Item #5193

Braunschweig: Friedrich Vieweg, 1872. First edition, very rare in commerce, of Dedekind’s great work on the foundations of mathematics. “This short work [Stetigkeit und irrationale Zahlen] marks a significant epoch in the movement known as the arithmetization of analysis, that is, the replacement of intuitive geometric notions by concepts described..... More
Item #4558

Basel: Eusebius & Heirs of Nikolaus Episcopius, 1575. First edition, very rare, of the first systematic treatise on algebra (Smith, Rara Arithmetica, p. 348), which “inspired the rebirth of number theory” (Britannica), translated from the Greek by Wilhelm Holtzmann [Xylander] – the original Greek text was not published until 1621..... More
Item #4710

[Colophon:] Vicenza: Leonardus de Basilea and Gulielmusde Papia, 1491. A fine copy, with wide margins, of the second edition of the “oldest mathematical textbook still in common use today” (PMM), “much more uncommon than the edtio princeps” (Thomas-Stanford, p. 5), and especially rare in an unrestored contemporary binding as here..... More
Item #5194

Castres: F. Barcouda, 1664. First edition in French, very rare, of two works by Castelli and Torricelli which founded the modern science of hydraulics, and including an original contribution by Fermat which is published for the first time in this work – only two other scientific works of Fermat were..... More
Item #5780

Berlin: Königlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1868. First edition, very rare, of Helmholtz’s famous and important contribution to non-Euclidean geometry, ‘On the facts which lay at the foundations of geometry’. “Motivated by his study of visual perception, throughout the mid-1860s Helmholtz investigated the most general analytic expressions of spatial relations. He..... More
Item #5428

Leipzig: Teubner, 1901. First complete publication, extremely rare offprint issue, of Hilbert’s famous and enormously influential address to the International Congress of Mathematicians at Paris in 1900 in which he set forth a list of twenty-three problems that he predicted would be of central importance to the advance of mathematics..... More
Item #5482

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

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 for the author’s children and sold by A. Millar, et al. 1748. First edition, large-paper copy, of Maclaurin’s statement of Newtonian theory, one of the three “most outstanding popular introductions to Newtonian science of the eighteenth century” (I. B. Cohen, Franklin and Newton, 1956, p. 209). “Though a...... More
Item #3409

London: for William and John Innys, 1720. First edition, very rare in commerce, of Maclaurin’s first book, dedicated to Newton and bearing his imprimatur as president of the Royal Society. Maclaurin is best known for his Treatise of Fluxions (1742), “the earliest logical and systematic publication of the Newtonian methods..... More
Item #5542