[TITLED IN CYRILLIC]: VYCHISLITELNYE METODY LINEYNOY ALGEBRY. [Computational Methods of Linear Algebra].

Moscow & Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoye liZdatel'stvo Tekhniko-teoreticheskoi Literatury, 1950., 1950.. Good. A WONDERFUL ASSOCIATION COPY OF A LANDMARK WORK ON LINEAR ALGEBRA - Octavo, 8-1/4 inches high by 5-3/8 inches wide. Brown cloth titled in gilt on the spine and in gilt and blind on the front cover. The covers are rubbed and bumped and the gilt is fading. 240 pages, with profuse charts and tables, including a long folding table. The text block is cracked at the title page and also between pages 128 & 129. Very good.

FIRST EDITION of 5,000 copies published by the State Publishing House of Technical and Theoretical Literature. The text is in Cyrillic. The following text precedes the title: "Fiziko-Matematicheskaya "i"Lioteka Inzhenera" [Physical and Mathematical Engineering Library].

A wonderful association, from the library of the American mathematician and computer scientist Phyllis Fox, with her name and the date "Phyllis Fox / Sept. 26, 1955" penned at the top of the front endpaper. Fox has additionally penciled her own index on the front pastedown & endpaper and profusely annotated the text with her notes and translations penciled in the margins throughout.

The author, Vera Nikolaevna Faddeeva (1906-1983) began her higher education studies under the faculty of Physics and Mathematics at Leningrad State Pedagogical Institute in 1927 before transferring to Leningrad State University where, advised by Nikolai Maksimovich Gyunter, an expert on the Stieltjes integral and its applications to mathemathical physics, she graduated in 1930. These were difficult years for academics and independent thinkers were persecuted. In fact her teacher & advisor N.M. Gyunter lived in great danger. Beginning with employment at the Leningrad Board of Weights and Measures, Faddeeva pursued careers in mathematical research, and was appointed as a junior researcher at the Leningrad Division of the Steklov Institute of Mathematics of the USSR Academy of Sciences in 1942. Earning her PhD in 1946, she went on to publish "The method of lines applied to some boundary problems" and "On fundamental functions of the operator X^ [IV]" in 1949. She wrote two books in 1950 including the one at hand her famous treatise "Computational methods of linear algebra". She also co-wrote a table of Bessel functions with Mark Konstantinovich Gavurin who, with Leonid Kantorovich, had "set up a computational mathematics unit within the mathematical analysis department at Leningrad State University in 1948. This unit became the basis for the Department of Computational Mathematics set up in 1951. Faddeeva was closely associated with the computational developments by Kantorovich, especially at the Steklov Institute of Mathematics where she became head of the Laboratory of Numerical Computations". [Biographical information and quotes from J J O'Connor and E F Robertson's article published by the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland].

In his review of the book, George Elmer Forsythe (1917-1972), the founder and head of Stanford university's Computer Science Department, wrote: "This is a textbook on numerical methods for solving finite systems of linear equations, inverting matrices, and calculating the eigenvalues of finite matrices, all with desk calculators. Although the book is far from exhaustive, the mathematical elegance, the breadth of material , and the number of error-free numerical examples make this by far the finest book to appear in the field."

The American mathematician and computer scientist Phyllis Ann Fox earned her B.A. in mathematics at Wellesley College in 1944 and worked for General Electric's differential analyser project. Fox subsequently pursued her studies at the University of Colorado and MIT, earning her doctorate in mathematics under Chia-Chiao Lin in 1954 while also working as an assistant on MIT's Whirlwind project under Jay Forrester. Fox was involved in the early phases of computer science, working for the Computing Center of the United States Atomic Energy Commission at NYU on the numerical solution of partial differential equations on the Univac computer. Back at MIT in 1958, she was part of Forrester's team that wrote the DYNAMO programming language. A collaborator on the first LISP interpreter, she was the main author of the manual. She became a full professor at Newark College of Engineering in 1972 and consulted for Bell Labs on their highly portable numerics library.

RARE FIRST EDITION of a significant work in the field of numerical linear algebra.