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: Clemente Ferroni, 1632. First edition, rare, of Cavalieri’s highly important treatise on conic sections and their applications in optics, acoustics and, perhaps most significantly, mechanics. Its importance in the history of the telescope is well-known: “Cavalieri’s design may well have been in all the essentials a direct anticipation of..... More
Item #5314

Paris: Nyon, Didot and Quillau, 1731. First edition, very rare, of Clairaut’s first publication, the first extended treatment of the geometry of curves in three dimensions, written when he was only sixteen. In it Clairaut demonstrates a claim made by Newton that all cubic curves in three dimensions are projections..... More
Item #5816

Paris: Antoine Dezallier, 1679. First and only edition, incredibly rare, of the last (surviving) contribution published by the brilliant French mathematician Girard Desargues in the notorious ‘perspective wars’ – Desargues was “the greatest perspectivist and projective geometer of his generation” (Kemp, The Science of Art, p. 120). Desargues published his..... More
Item #5918

Paris: Melchior Mondiere, 1625. Very rare editio princeps of this important text by Euclid, his only work in pure geometry, other than the Elements, to have survived in Greek. It is here accompanied by a commentary, or rather an introduction, by Marinus of Naples (5th century AD), the pupil and..... More
Item #3427

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

Leipzig & Berlin: B.G. Teubner & F. Deuticke, 1931-37. First editions, a very rare complete set in the original printed wrappers, of all eight issues of these proceedings to which Gödel contributed thirteen important papers and remarks on the foundations of logic and mathematics. The last three issues are particularly..... More
Item #5970

Berlin: Julius Springer, 1923. First edition, the extremely rare author’s presentation offprint issue, of the second major paper in the development of the 'Hilbert programme.' Based upon a lecture given at Leipzig in September 1923, it is the sequel to Hilbert's Neubegründung der Mathematik (1922), in which Hilbert had put forward his proposal..... More
Item #4475

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

Venice: apud Franciscum Franciscium Senensem, 1575. First and only edition, rare, and with a distinguished provenance, containing seven ‘opuscula,’ and, with separate title and pagination, the Arithmeticorum libri duo; all of these works were published here for the first time. One of the ‘opuscula’ contains the most important original work..... More
Item #5621