Search Results: Authors starting with J from SOPHIA RARE BOOKS

Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1874. First edition. THE PRECURSOR OF THE MOVIE CAMERA" - "THE FIRST 'FILM'" (SINGER). First edition, extremely rare offprint, of Janssen's epoch-making description of his 'photographic revolver' and of its first results, "the first 'film'" (Singer, A History of Technology V, p. 739). "The first practical device for sequential photography, invented to record the transit of Venus in 1874, was later recognized as the precursor of the movie camera ... Janssen's 'revolver photographique'" (Launay & Hingley, p. 57). With this apparatus, the first to photograph successive phases of a single movement, Janssen "realized one of the operations necessary for cinematography" (DSB). Indeed, it was Janssen's invention of this device which spurred Étienne Jules Marey to use it (first in March 1882) to record the flight of birds, to which Janssen responded in 'Note sur le principe d'un nouveau révolver photographique,' 3 April 1882 (also included here). These papers of Janssen led to… Read More

Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1870. First edition. THE FOUNDATION WORK OF MODERN GROUP THEORY. 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 erected by Jordan is admirable" (Van der Waerden, A History of Algebra, p. 117). "In 1870, Jordan gathered all his results on permutation groups for the previous ten years in a huge volume, Traité des Substitutions, which for thirty years was to remain the bible of all specialists in group theory. His fame had spread beyond France, and foreign students were eager to attend his lectures; in particular Felix Klein and Sophus Lie came to Paris in 1870 to study with Jordan" (DSB)‎. "An instant classic, his Traité set a new research agenda of creating a theory of groups as opposed to the older agenda of… Read More

Berlin: Springer, 1927. First edition. ANTICIPATING DIRAC ON QUANTUM FIELD THEORY AND FERMI AND DIRAC ON THEIR STATISTICS . First edition, extremely rare offprint, of this important paper, in which Jordan introduces his approach to quantum field theory, independent of Dirac's, and also gives his formulation of Fermi-Dirac statistics, which he had developed earlier than both Fermi and Dirac. "Pascual Jordan is the unsung hero among the creators of quantum mechanics. Major portions of the two papers he co-authored with Born and Heisenberg that elaborated matrix mechanics, following Heisenberg's initial insight, were Jordan's contribution. Similarly, he was responsible for laying the foundations of quantum field theory" (Schweber, pp. 5-6). "Before the end of the year [1925] Jordan had submitted a single author paper. This papercontained what is nowadays known as the Fermi-Dirac statistics; however it encountered an extremely unfortunate fate after its submission because it landed on the bottom of one… Read More