Search Results: Authors starting with P from SOPHIA RARE BOOKS

Toscolano: Paganino de' Paganini, 1523. "THE FIRST GREAT GENERAL WORK ON MATHEMATICS PRINTED" (SMITH) "THE MOST INFLUENTIAL WORK IN THE HISTORY OF CAPITALISM" THE BARON-LANDAU - HANS FÜRSTENBERG COPY . Second edition, very rare, a close reprint of the first edition (Venice, 1494), and a copy with distinguished provanence. The Summa is a work of enormous importance on several levels. It is the first mathematical encyclopaedia of the Renaissance, "the first great general work on mathematics printed" (Smith, Rara arithmetica, p. 56), and the first printing of any of the works of the great thirteenth-century mathematician Leonardo of Pisa, called Fibonacci (c. 1175-c. 1250), and of Pacioli's friend, the brilliant mathematician and artist Piero della Francesca (1416-92). The first part of the Summa is the first printed comprehensive treatment of algebra and arithmetic, based largely on Fibonacci's 1202 Liber Abaci which famously introduced Arabic numbers to the West, and which was itself in part a… Read More

[Venice: Tacuino, 1519. First edition. Hardcover. THE BLACK TULIP OF ALCHEMICAL AND CHEMICAL LITERATURE. First edition of one of the greatest rarities in the alchemical and chemical literature; this is an exceptionally interesting copy, bound with twelve leaves of contemporary script conveying an all-encompassing 'tree of human endeavours', charting the features and visually suggesting the relative position of human faculties and of most fields of knowledge, an extraordinarily wide-ranging array that includes disciplines such as economics and politics amongst more traditional trivium and quadrivium 'artes', and of course alchemy. "Pantheus wrote against spurious alchemy and he deals partly with the assay of gold and partly with the chemical preparation of various substances which were made at Venice in his time and were used in the arts. He describes, for example, the manufacture of white lead and of an alloy for mirrors. Pantheus was a priest at Venice, but seems nevertheless to have been devoted to… Read More

Paris: André Wechel, 1568. First edition. Hardcover. THE PLAGUE, SMALLPOX, AND MEASLES. First edition of Paré's extremely rare treatise on the plague, smallpox and measles, based upon his own direct observations of these diseases, "one of his best works" (Thornton, p. 63). "Having passed the winter of 1564-65 on tour in Provence with Catherine de Medici and the young King Charles IX, where the ravages of a plague epidemic, added to poverty and general misery, were painfully apparent, Paré was requested by the queen mother to make whatever knowledge he possessed of the disease available to the world. He therefore puts into a book his ideas as to its cause, transmission, and treatment, and says he writes only of what he has seen by long experience during his three years at the Hôtel-Dieu, his travels, his practice in Paris, and his own slight attack while he was serving his internship. This is one of Paré's most systematic treatises; for its careful symptomatology and thorough description of… Read More

Paris: André Wechel, 1572. First edition. Hardcover. TWO OF PARÉ'S MOST IMPORTANT WORKS. First editions of two of Paré's most important works, both very rare, and in fine condition. "The Cinq livres contains all new material. It had been called by several serious writers Paré's chef d'oeuvre ... in it appears the first description of the fracture of the head and of the femur. Secondly, it is the first appearance of the whole teaching of bandages, fractures, and dislocations which has come down to us from the ancients, broadened by Paré's own experience ... It is undoubtedly one of his most important works" (Doe 19). The Traicté de la peste was written from direct experience of the plague: "Having passed the winter of 1564-65 on tour in Provence with Catherine de Medici and the young king Charles IX, where the ravages of a plague epidemic, added to poverty and general misery, were painfully apparent, Paré was requested by the queen mother to make whatever knowledge he possessed of the disease… Read More

Bath; Bath & London: printed by R. Cruttwell; and sold by Cadell and Davies; printed by R. Cruttwell & sold by Cadell and Davies, London, J. Collow, 1806. THE FIRST TO MAKE THE CONNECTION BETWEEN ANGINA AND CORONARY HEART DISEASE. First edition, rare, of this work in which Parry was the first to make the connection between angina and coronary heart disease. "In this important contribution to the understanding of the coronary circulation, Parry ... reports on several patients suffering from what he termed 'syncope anginosa' and concludes that the condition is caused by disease of the coronary arteries" (Heirs of Hippocrates). He remarked in his case notes that angina most often occurred in obese males over 50 and his autopsies showed calcification in the coronary arteries. He read his paper on the topic before the Gloucester Medical Society in 1788 and it was published in 1799 as the offered work. Parry delayed publication because Edward Jenner had diagnosed John Hunter as having angina pectoris and… Read More

Paris: Mallet-Bachelier, 1862. First edition. PMM 336 - THE REFUTATION OF SPONTANEOUS GENERATION. First edition, very rare offprint, inscribed by Pasteur. "The longest and most important of Pasteur's papers on spontaneous generation, describing the series of classic experiments with bent-necked and sealed flasks by which he proved conclusively that fermentation and putrefaction are not the products of spontaneous generation, but result from contamination by airborne micro-organisms. Pasteur's experiments also mark the beginning of microbiology since, by showing how to sterilize a liquid and keep it sterile, he opened up the possibility of culturing and studying a single micro-organism in the absence of any others. Pasteur's paper was first printed in Vol. 16 of the Annales des sciences naturelles, Zoologie, 4th series (1861), but no offprints were made from this journal printing. The present offprint, printed in a small edition, was made from the Annales de chimie et de physique, 3rd series (1862),… Read More

Berlin: Julius Springer, 1926. First edition. Hardcover. THE FIRST TEST OF QUANTUM MECHANICS. First edition, journal issue in original printed wrappers, of Pauli's important derivation of the hydrogen spectrum from the new quantum mechanics, providing the first validation of Heisenberg's theory. As Pauli explains in the abstract: "It is shown that the Balmer terms of an atom with a single electron are yielded correctly by the new quantum mechanics and that the difficulties which arose in the old theory... disappear in the new theory." Heisenberg's epochal 'Über quantentheoretische Umdeutung kinematischer und mechanischer Beziehungen,' the invention of quantum mechanics, had appeared just a few months earlier, in September 1925. "The first nontrivial and physically important application of quantum mechanics was made soon afterwards by Wolfgang Pauli [in the present paper], who calculated the stationary energy values of the hydrogen atom by the matrix method and found complete agreement with Bohr's… Read More

Turin: Bocca Brothers, 1889. First edition. Hardcover. THE PEANO AXIOMS. First edition, and a fine copy in the original printed wrappers, of Peano's most important work, which contains the first statement of the famous 'Peano axioms' for the natural numbers and which remains of seminal importance to mathematics and mathematical logic. "Peano's most important contribution to the development of the theory and practice of the axiomatic method was his system of axioms for the arithmetic of the natural numbers... On the basis of his axiomatization, Peano constructed the entire theory of natural numbers. In particular, he showed how the elementary theorems of arithmetic can be obtained from his axioms" (Styazhkin, History of Mathematical Logic from Leibniz to Peano, 1969, pp. 278-9). "... with the publication of Arithmetices principia, nova methodo exposita, Peano not only improved his logical symbolism but also used his new method to achieve important new results in mathematics; this short booklet… Read More

Paris: Chez Richard, Caille et Ravier, 1801. First edition. A LANDMARK WORK ON PSYCHIATRY. First edition of a landmark work on the treatment of the insane and mentally ill. It presented the textual foundation of psychiatry, stands as the first great publication of the nineteenth century in clinical medicine, and at the same time as one of the paradigmatic expressions of the medical and scientific revolution that was taking place in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In 1793 Pinel, newly appointed physician at the Bicêtre Hospital, the Paris asylum for men, ordered the chains and shackles removed from 49 patients (an event commemorated at the time in paintings and popular prints) in order to try his new, more humane methods of treatment. He did the same for the female inmates of Salpêtrière when he became the director there in 1794. "Pinel's psychiatric work effectively transformed the prison for the insane into a hospital. He did not merely initiate better treatment for the… Read More

Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth, 1900. First edition. THE INVENTION OF QUANTUM THEORY "A TURNING POINT IN THE HISTORY OF PHYSICS" (NOBEL). First edition, a very fine copy, contained in a complete volume of Verhandlungen der Deutschen Physikalischen Gesellschaft, of the first appearance of Planck's revolutionary quantum theory, arguably the most important development in twentieth-century physics. Planck was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics 1918 "in recognition of the services he rendered to the advancement of Physics by his discovery of energy quanta." "Planck was professor of physics at Berlin when he published his first presentation of quantum theory [offered here]. In this important paper he stated that energy flowed not in continuous, indefinitely divisible currents, but in pulses or bursts of action [or quanta]. Planck, working with black-body radiation, therewith gave the world of atomic physics a unit of energy in a system showing a natural frequency in definite quanta and proposed a constant… Read More

Edinburgh: [Neill & Co. for] Caddell and Davies; William Creech, 1802. EVANS 66 - "OF THIS GREAT CLASSIC IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO SPEAK TOO HIGHLY" First edition of "one of the most conspicuous landmarks in the progress of British geology" (DSB). "Of this great classic it is impossible to speak too highly. For precision of statement and felicity of language it has no superior in English scientific literature." (Evans). Playfair (1748-1819) was Professor of Mathematics at Edinburgh from 1785 to 1805. In 1795 he published an important edition of Euclid, containing an original formulation of the fifth postulate. "Playfair's fame as a scientist, however, rests almost entirely on his work in geology -hardly a "professional" study at the time - in presenting Hutton's momentous theory in a clear and palatable form (which Hutton himself had failed to do), and in adding materially to the geological knowledge of the time" (DSB). "Playfair's exposition and development of James Hutton's Uniformitarian theory of the… Read More

Palermo: [Tipografia Matematica], 1906. First edition. THE SPECIAL THEORY OF RELATIVITY. First edition, extremely rare separately-paginated offprint, of this crucial paper in the development of the special theory of relativity, in which Poincaré showed that the Lorentz transformations form a group and that the Maxwell-Lorentz electromagnetic theory is invariant under this 'Lorentz group' (when augmented by space and time translations, it becomes what is now known as the 'Poincaré group'). "The development of mathematics in the nineteenth century began under the shadow of a giant, Carl Friedrich Gauss; it ended with the domination by a genius of similar magnitude, Henri Poincaré. Both were universal mathematicians in the supreme sense and both made important contributions to astronomy and mathematical physics ... Poincaré was active in the discussions concerning Lorentz's theory of the electron from 1899 on; Poincaré was the first to observe that the Lorentz transformations form a group ... and… Read More

Paris: Gauthier-Villars et Fils, 1892. First edition. Hardcover. THE BIRTH OF TOPOLOGY. First edition of Poincaré's first paper on topology, which gave birth to the subject in its modern sense. "One of the most unexpected developments in twentieth-century mathematics has been the meteoric rise of the subject known as topology. Topology is sometimes described as 'rubber-sheet geometry', a whimsical and somewhat misleading description which nevertheless succeeds in capturing the flavour of the subject. Topology is the study of those properties of geometrical objects which remain unchanged under continuous transformations of the object" (Stewart, p. 144). "The publication (1892) of Poincaré's first note on topology ... marks the beginning of the subject of algebraic, or 'combinatorial,' topology. There was earlier scattered work by Euler, Listing (who coined the work 'topology'), Möbius and his band, Riemann, Klein, and Betti. Indeed, even as early as 1679, Leibniz indicated the desirability of… Read More

Paris: Bachelier, 1835. POISSON'S MOLECULAR MODEL OF HEAT CONDUCTION. First edition, presentation copy inscribed by Poisson to Marie Jean Pierre Flourens, of this classic work on the mathematical theory of heat conduction. "Poisson scored a point in this work by demonstrating how the conductibility of heat in the interior of bodies, far from being contained in the notion of flux as Fourier had held, must be derived from an absorption coefficient that restores a neglected functional dimension. It was in this area that ... Poisson's mechanical model for conduction of heat was the most fruitful. That conception enabled Poisson to understand on the molecular scale the complete and correct equation for radiation of heat" (DSB). "The year ... 1835 saw the appearance of the next installment of Poisson's 'treatise of mathematical physics': his Théorie mathématique de la Chaleur, a 532-page volume put out by Bachelier in 1,000 copies. The introduction included his history of heat theory, and was followed by… Read More

Venice: Aloysius Pavinus, 1709. First edition. POLENI'S COMPUTER. First edition of Poleni's first book, the second part of which is a description of an early 'arithmetical machine,' or primitive calculator. Babbage had a copy of this work in his library. "Poleni's earliest paper was Miscellanea: de barometris et thermometris; de machinaquadam arithmetiea; de sectionibus conicis in horologiis solaribus describendis (Venice, 1709). A treatise on assorted topics, it includes a dissertation on barometers ... and on thermometers, in which several improvements are proposed; also included is the design of an arithmetic machine based on reports that Poleni had received of those of Pascal and of Leibniz. Poleni actually built this machine, which was reportedly very simple and easy to operate; but when he heard of another machine presented to the emperor by the Viennese mechanician Braun, he destroyed his own and never rebuilt it" (DSB). "Poleni'scalculator - in the shape of a big grandfather clock, in wood… Read More

Venice: Vincenzo Valgrisi, 1561. First edition. FIRST RUSCELLI EDITION OF PTOLEMY'S GEOGRAPHY . First edition of one of the most important and influential editions of Ptolemy'sGeography, edited and translated from Greek into Italian by the great scholar Girolamo Ruscelli, the founder the first European scientific society, the Accademia Segreta in Naples, with his numerous remarks and extensive addenda. "A new and important edition" (Sabin). The Renaissance rediscovery of the Greek text of Ptolemy's Geography captured the imagination of thinkers across disciplines. Although none of the original maps survived antiquity, Renaissance cartographers rose to the challenge of re-illustrating the famous treatise. In this edition, the maps are enlarged copies of Gastaldi's maps in the 1548 Ptolemy. Ruscelli has reinserted the map of the old world by Ptolemy (excluded from the Gastaidi edition), drawn the world map on a new projection, and added three new maps. Two important innovations were introduced through… Read More

Nuremberg: Jo. Stuchs, 1514. First edition. Hardcover. THE WERNER MAP PROJECTION. First edition of Werner's "most famous work on astronomy and geography" (MacTutor), an extremely rare and highly influential work on cartography and navigation, notable for several 'firsts': it contains the first published direct translation of any part of Ptolemy's Geography from the original Greek; the first publication of the Werner map projection, which was widely used for world and continental maps through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, notably by Mercator, Oronce Finé and Ortelius; the invention of the lunar distance method of longitude determination, which was the principal method used by navigators until the second half of the 18th century; and the invention, and first illustration, of the cross-staff, an instrument designed to make the necessary astronomical observations at sea. "Werner's mathematical and astronomical work has been quite undeservedly neglected by historians" (North, p. 61). Werner… Read More