Search Results: Authors starting with M from Atticus Rare Books

FIRST EDITION IN ORIGINAL WRAPS OF A PIONEERING TECHNIQUE FOR PROJECT PLANNING AND MONITORING commonly called PERT (Project Evaluation Review Technique. The paper "describes the development and application of a technique for measuring and controlling development progress" for the Navy's Polaris Fleet Ballistic Missile program" (Malcolm, et al., 1959, p. 646). A statistical mathematics tool, PERT was "set up to develop, test, and implement a methodology for providing [the Special Projects, Bureau of Ordnance Office of the US Navy] with integrated and quantitative evaluation of (a) progress to date and the outlook for accomplishing the objectives of the FBM program, (b) validity of established plans and schedules for accomplishing the program objectives, and (c) effects of changes proposed in established plans" (ibid). In short, PERT analyzed and represented the tasks involved to successfully complete any given project. Formal work on PERT began at General Dynamics in early 1958 with the objective… Read More

THREE FIRST EDITIONS IN ORIGINAL WRAPS OF EACH OF MANDELBROT'S SEMINAL PAPERS ON THE MARKETS — the 1963 paper itself, the 1967 followup, and the 1972 correction — all housed in a quarter calf clamshell case. Though best known for his development of fractal geometry, prior to that, Benoit Mandelbrot applied his prodigious skills to economics, finding that prices in financial markets did not follow a Gaussian distribution but rather Lévy stable distributions having theoretically infinite variance. Put another way, Mandelbrot believes that "Wild price swings, business failures, windfall trading profits - these are key phenomena. In all their drama and power, they should matter most to bankers, regulators and investors." And Mandelbrot showed them to be much more common than they would be if market movements followed a standard bell curve. The 20th century saw 48 days in which the Dow Jones Industrial Average swung more than 7 per cent. ‘Normal' statistical modelling predicts such swings should… Read More

London: The Royal Society, 1841. 1st Edition. Full volume 1st editions of 3 important papers, MANTELL'S 2nd MAJOR PAPER ON THE IGUANODON; BOWMAN'S's CLASSIC PAPER ON THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MUSCLES; & ONE OF A NUMBER OF LUKE HOWARD'S PAPERS "WHICH TRANSFORMED THE SCIENCE OF METEOROLOGY" (Wikipedia). MANTELL'S PAPER: Gideon Mantell "is best known for his discovery of the first dinosaur ever to be described properly - a momentous event" (Dictionary of Scientific Biography, IX, 87). Mantell published three major papers on his Iguanodon, the first in 1825, the 1941 paper offered here, and the last, the 1848 paper inclusive of the most complete description. In 1822, Mantell discovered the teeth of a giant reptile in West Sussex. "In 1825 he was shown teeth of the modern lizard iguana, and he saw that his fossil teeth were similar but much larger. That same year, Mantell announced, described, and named his discovery in the first of the 3 papers. It was eventually pointed out that the teeth resembled those of… Read More

New Haven: Converse, 1831. 1st Edition. Gideon Mantell (1790-1852) was an English obstetrician, geologist and paleontologist best known for his discovery of the first dinosaur ever to be described properly -- a momentous event" (DSB, 87). In "The Geological Age of Reptiles," Mantell is responding to a paper by Cuvier postulating a four-stage sequence of life on earth, the age of reptiles being first. In it, Mantell writes "The earth was people by oviparous quadrupeds of a most appalling magnitude, and reptiles were the ‘Lords of the Creation,' before the existence of the human race." ALSO includes Samuel Guthrie's landmark paper on the discovery of Chloroform and Nicholas Hentz's seminal work on spiders which formed "the basis of the study of American arachnology.". CONDITION & DETAILS: New Haven: Converse. Complete volume. 8vo. (8.5 x 5.5 inches, 213 x 138mm). 3 unrelated plates. Bound in black buckram. Ex-libris with marks at spine neatly blacked. Small ex-libris stamps on the first few… Read More

New Haven: Converse, 1831. 1st Edition. The work of Nicholas Marcellus Hentz (1797-1856) forms "the basis of the study of American arachnology" (A list of works on North American entomology, 77). A native of Versailles, France, Hentz studied miniature painting, then medicine, before emigrating to America in 1816 after the downfall of Napoleon. Hentz received an MA degree from the University of North Carolina and when on to become one of the pioneers in American entomology as well as the originator of American arachnology, single-handedly and formally describing 124 spider species" (Wikipedia). "On North American Spiders" was Hentz's second paper on spiders. ALSO includes Samuel Guthrie's landmark paper on the discovery of Chloroform and a paper on the geological age of reptiles by Gideon Mantell. CONDITION & DETAILS: New Haven: Converse. Complete volume. 8vo. (8.5 x 5.5 inches, 213 x 138mm). 3 unrelated plates. Bound in black buckram. Ex-libris with marks at spine neatly blacked. Small ex-libris… Read More

London: Royal Society, 1866. 1st Edition. 1st ed., full volume (Parts I & II) of an important volume of Philosophical Transactions complete with 43 plates. A number of important papers are included, the most important of which is the appearance of a major paper by James Clerk Maxwell on the kinetic theory of gases, here demonstrating that the viscosity (internal friction) of a gas is a function of its temperature but not its pressure. MAXWELL: Building on the work of Clausius and working to provide a mathematical basis for the kinetic theory of gases, Maxwell here conducts a series of "experiments that demonstrated that the viscosity of a gas is proportional to the density, mean free path and mean velocity of its molecules. Since mean free path is inversely proportional to density, an increase in pressure (which equally increases density and reduces mean free path) doesn't result in a change in viscosity. And since average velocity is proportional to absolute temperature, viscosity is solely a… Read More

Lancaster: American Institute of Physics, 1950. 1st Edition. BOUND FIRST EDITION IN ORIGINAL WRAPS OF THE TWO PAPERS IN WHICH MARCIA MAYER DEVELOPS A MATHEMATICAL MODEL FOR THE STRUCTURE OF NUCLEAR SHELLS. Mayer "was the first person to investigate the theoretical basis of nuclear pairing," something which plays a critical role in the shell model of the atomic nucleus. Along with J.H.D. Jenson and Eugene Wigner (for their contributions to the theory of the atomic nucleus and nuclear shell structure), Mayer won the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physics for this work. "Mayer was a mathematical physicist with a facility for the matrix manipulations of group theory and quantum mechanics and a chemist's appreciation for the accumulation and analysis of large quantities of physical data" (Dictionary of Scientific Biography). In 1950, there were two major theories of the nucleus: the liquid drop model and the shell model. "The reality of some kind of shell arrangement became clear only in 1948, when Mayer [in this… Read More

Lancaster: American Institute of Physics, 1950. 1st Edition. BOUND FIRST EDITION OF THE TWO PAPERS IN WHICH MARCIA MAYER DEVELOPS A MATHEMATICAL MODEL FOR THE STRUCTURE OF NUCLEAR SHELLS. Mayer "was the first person to investigate the theoretical basis of nuclear pairing," something which plays a critical role in the shell model of the atomic nucleus. Along with J.H.D. Jenson and Eugene Wigner (for their contributions to the theory of the atomic nucleus and nuclear shell structure), Mayer won the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physics for this work. "Mayer was a mathematical physicist with a facility for the matrix manipulations of group theory and quantum mechanics and a chemist's appreciation for the accumulation and analysis of large quantities of physical data" (Dictionary of Scientific Biography). In 1950, there were two major theories of the nucleus: the liquid drop model and the shell model. "The reality of some kind of shell arrangement became clear only in 1948, when Mayer [in this paper] brought… Read More

New York: American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1968. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION IN ORIGINAL WRAPS OF MCCREA'S "Cosmology After Half a Century: Fifty Years After Einstein's Paper of 1917". In this paper, the British physicist McCrea gives an important historical overview and specifically addresses "the basic cosmological models and evaluated their performance" by measuring the available physical evidence against available observational evidence" (Encyclopedia Portal). "From the very beginning of his work in the field, McCrea had sought to confront cosmological theory with observation, in part simply to restrain excursions of theorists imaginations, and in part to provide evidence for choosing between competing models" (ibid). In this paper, McCrea describes the observational inconsistency in the interpretation of particle horizons in some models of the Big Bang, also known as the "horizon problem", as one of the most important remaining issues in cosmology. William Hunter McCrea… Read More

London: Royal Society, 1960. 1st Edition. HANDSOME FIRST EDITION OF MCCREA'S "PROTOPLANET THEORY" OF THE CREATION OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM in which the Sun and planets individually coalesced from matter within the same cloud, with the smaller planets later captured by the Sun's larger gravity. After the 1687 publication of Newton's Principia, the heliocentric nature of the solar system with its major components - the Sun, planets and satellites - was so firmly established that it became possible to apply scientific principles to the problem of the solar system's origin. "Most theories that have been advanced in the last 300 years are obviously untenable, but some contain the germs of what might be part of a viable theory" (Oxford Journal of Science & Mathematics, Volume 41, Issue 1, pp. 1.12). William McCrea's protoplanet theory is one of a very small group of theories "that have a reasonable scientific basis" (ibid). In this paper, McCrea presents his theory linking planetary formation with the… Read More

FIRST EDITION IN ORIGINAL WRAPPERS OF MEEHL & TEBALDI'S 2004 CLIMATE MODEL PREDICTING THE STRENGTHING OF HEAT WAVE INTENSITY AND FREQUENCY IN THE FUTURE. This issue bears the address label of Gary L. Bennett, an American scientist and engineer, specializing in aerospace and energy and whose "professional career has included work on the Voyager, Galileo, and Ulysses space missions" (Wikipedia). The authors "address possible future changes in heat waves explicitly, and find an increased risk of more intense, longer-lasting and more frequent heat waves in a future climate" (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Climate Change 2007 - The Physical Science Basis, p. 786). Their "global coupled climate model shows that there is a distinct geographic pattern to future changes in heat waves. Model results for areas of Europe and North America, associated with the severe heat waves in Chicago in 1995 and Paris in 2003, show that future heat waves in these areas will become more intense, more frequent,… Read More

Berlin: Julius Springer, 1933. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION, FULL VOLUME, OF MEISSNER & OCHSENFELD'S CONSEQUENTIAL 1933 DISCOVERY OF THE MEISSNER EFFECT: "SUPERCONDUCTORS EXPEL MAGNETIC FIELDS" (Brandt, Harvest of the Century, 362). "Superconductivity [is] one of the most spectacular phenomena of physics, [arising] when a superconducting material is cooled to a low critical temperature. Suddenly, an electric current can flow with no resistance whatsoever" (Nobel Prize Press Release]. Simultaneously, the Meissner effect occurs. Meissner and Ochsenfeld's ‘unexpected' discovery that superconductors exclude magnetic fields from their interior "had important experimental and theoretical consequences" (Brandt). While superconductivity was first observed by Onnes in 1911, M & O's observation took the first step toward explaining it; their work led as well to the pioneering theories of Fritz and Heinz London who were able to provide a theoretical description of the electrodynamics of superconductivity not… Read More

London: Macmillan, 1939. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITIONS, FOUR LANDMARK PAPERS DOCUMENTING THE DISCOVERY OF NUCLEAR FISSION, including Meitner and Frisch's "Disintegration of Uranium by Neutron", the first announcement of the new process.  Building upon the work of many before him, including Rutherford, Chadwick, Corbino, Pontecorvo, Curie and Joliot, Enrico Fermi wanted "to patent a process they had perfected for the production of artificial radio-activity by slow neutron bombardment. This process was a by-product of repetitions and enlargements of a discovery [by Curie and Joliot] that the bombardment of certain light elements with alpha particles induced radio-activity. "Experiments conducted in 1938 at Berlin by Hahn and Strassman were reported to Lise Meitner, an Austrian scientist who had fled to Copenhagen to escape religious persecution. She and her nephew, O. R. Frisch, working in Niels Bohr's laboratory, found the true explanation of these phenomenon. The interpolation of a neutron into… Read More

New York: Knopf, 1934. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION WITH DUST JACKET. NEAR FINE CONDITION. Including "The Nature and Origin of Morality", "Its Evolution", "Its Variety", "Its Christian Form", "Its State Today" CONDITION & DETAILS: 8vo. [ix], 277, [xix], 5. Original blue cloth, gilt-lettered at the spine, blind stamped on the front board. Small discoloration at the head of the front wrap; a little toned at the spine of the front wrap. Bright and clean throughout. Near fine.

Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth, 1869. 1st Edition. FIRST GERMAN EDITION OF MENDELÉEV'S DOCTORAL DISSERTATION "O soedineni spirta s vodoyu" from 1865. On the basis of his successful defense of his study of the interaction between alcohol and water and the densities of their combination, Mendeleev achieved tenure at St. Petersburg University in 1867 and became a full professor of technical chemistry. Two years later, Mendeleev formulated the periodic table of elements. He was the first chemist to understand that all elements are related members of a single ordered system. He converted what had hitherto been a highly fragmented and speculative branch of chemistry into a true, logical science. Working during the early 1860s, Mendeleev began to further develop concepts he had been considering since the mid 1850s, concepts ultimately expressed in his thesis. As he furthered his study of solutions, Mendeleev "gave the term ‘indefinite compounds' to substances that had constant physical properties, but… Read More

Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1875. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION OF THE FIRST OF MENDELEEV'S PREDICTED ELEMENTS TO BE IDENTIFIED, thereby confirming "the validity of the periodic system of elements" Mendeleev had designed (Niaz, Critical Appraisal of Physical Science, 62). "The confirmation of this prediction may certainly be called the culminating point in the history of the periodic system" (ibid). In 1869 "Mendeleev published a periodic table. Mendeleev also arranged the elements known at the time in order of relative atomic mass, but he did some other things that made his table much more successful. He realised that the physical and chemical properties of elements were related to their atomic mass in a 'periodic' way, and arranged them so that groups of elements with similar properties fell into vertical columns in his table. "Sometimes this method of arranging elements meant there were gaps in his horizontal rows or 'periods'. But instead of seeing this as a problem, Mendeleev thought it simply… Read More

New York: The American Physical Society. FIRST EDITION IN ORIGINAL WRAPS OF THE MERMIN-WAGNER THEOREM, BOTH THE ORIGINAL PAPER AND THE SUBSEQUENT ISSUE IN WHICH AN ERRATUM (correcting typographical errors) TO THE PAPER WAS PUBLISHED. Once referred to as "An Exact Monte Carlo Algorithm for Quantum Spin Systems", Mermin and Wagner "rigorously prove that at any nonzero temperature, a one- or two-dimensional isotropic spin-S Heisenberg model with finite-range exchange interaction can be neither ferromagnetic nor antiferromagnetic. The method of proof is capable of excluding a variety of types of ordering in one and two dimensions" (Vassiliev, Scientific Reports, Jan. 2017; Mermin & Wagner, 1966). "The Mermin-Wagner [also known as Mermin-Wagner-Hohenberg theorem, No-Go Theorem, Mermin-Wagner-Berezinskii theorem, or Coleman theorem] theorem exemplifies the crucial influence of both the dynamical symmetry and the spatial dimensionality on thermal phase transitions in many-body systems. It says: At… Read More

Paris: A. Maloine, 1897. 1st Edition. SCARCE FIRST EDITION OF AN EARLY WORK ON X-RAYS BY 19th MEDICAL PHOTOGRAPHER, FÉLIX MÉHEUX. SIGNED PRESENTATION COPY IN ORIGINAL WRAPS. Félix Méheux (1838-1908) was a medical photographer and an outstanding illustrator and colorist at the Hôpital Saint-Louis from 1884 to 1904. This pamphlet is affectionately inscribed to Professor Albert Fournier (1832-1914), First Professor of Cutaneous and Syphilitic Diseases at the same hospital. Méheux's work remains well-respected to this day. As said, this work is rare. While other Méheux publications and photos appear in the special collections of a number of important libraries throughout the world, only four copies of this work exist worldwide. Méheux's publication came shortly after Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen's discover of X-rays in late 1895. Röntgen's discovery electrified both the scientific community and the public at large. Though arguable, many consider Röntgen's discovery "the most globally… Read More

London: Taylor and Francis, 1891. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITIONS OF A NUMBER OF SIGNIFICANT PAPERS: PART I OF MICHELSON'S 1891 PAPER ON HIS NEWLY INVENTED INVESTIGATIVE TOOL, THE INTERFEROMETER also MICHELSON'S PAPER ON INTERFERENCE TECHNIQUES RELATED TO ASTRONOMICAL OBJECTS BEYOND THE RESOLUTION OF LARGE TELESCOPES also LORD RAYLEIGH'S IMPORTANT PAPER WITH THE FIRST CORRECT CALCULATIONS FOR USE IN PIN-HOLE PHOTOGRAPHY—THE EARLIEST TECHNICAL PAPER OF ITS KIND. MICHELSON: In Michelson's "On the Application..." paper, the first American scientist to win a Nobel Prize, demonstrates the usefulness of the interferometer that he invented in 1887 and that bears his name. His invention dazzled the scientific world and "pioneer[ed] applications in such diverse fields as astronomy, atomic spectra and mensuration followed (Shankland, PT 27, 37). Michelson here used that interferometer to determine the length of the International Prototype Meter in terms of the cadmium red line wavelength - the value of the meter… Read More

1887. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION, FIRST BRITISH PRINTING of a work haled both as the greatest failed experiment of all time AND as 'one of the greatest achievements in physics of all time' (Lightman, 130). 'What Michelson and Morley did... was undermine a longstanding belief in something called the luminiferous ether; a stable, invisible, weightless, frictionless... medium that was thought to permeate the universe. Conceived by Descartes, embraced by Newton, and venerated by nearly everyone ever since, the ether held a position of absolute centrality in nineteenth-century physics as a way of explaining how light traveled across the emptiness of space (Bryson, 117). Prevailing theories held that ether formed an absolute reference with respect to which the rest of the universe was stationary and that ether was a medium for the propagation of light (as water waves must have a medium to move across: water. Given the speed of light, designing an experiment to detect the presence of ether and its drift, or… Read More