Search Results: Authors starting with T from SOPHIA RARE BOOKS

Antwerp: Jacob van Meurs, 1651. First edition. 'ALLOWED THE PASSAGE FROM INDIVISIBLES TO INFINITESIMALS' . First edition, very rare, and a fine copy. "Tacquet's most important mathematical work, Cylindricorum et annularium, contained a number of original theorems on cylinders and rings. Its main importance, however, lay in its concern with questions of method. Tacquet rejected all notions [originating with Cavalieri] that solids are composed of planes, planes of lines, and so on, except as heuristic devices for finding solutions. The approach he adopted was that of Luca Valerio and Gregorius [of Saint-Vincent], an essentially Archimedean method" (DSB). "Tacquet's criticisms must have been effective, because indivisibles became homogeneous magnitudes as a result of innovations introduced during the course of the seventeenth century" (Rossini, p. 465). The historian of mathematics Henri Bosmans "states that it was Tacquet's decisive influence, followed by Pascal's large-scale implementation, which… Read More

Cologne: Johann Birkmann, 1562. First edition. Hardcover. THE SECOND PRINTED WORK ON MAGNETISM. First edition of this exceptionally rare, interesting, and notorious work - the second printed work on magnetism, preceded only by the Epistola de magnete of Peregrinus (1558) (which is virtually unobtainable). Taisnier's work, in fact, contains a plagiarism of Peregrinus, which it reprints verbatim, and of the equally rare Demonstratio proportionum motuum localium (1554) of Benedetti (1530-90), which anticipates Galileo's theory of falling bodies. But Taisnier's book also contains important original contributions, notably to navigation. It "had a section on the relation of hull shape to speed in ship design. Its most valuable contribution was a long dissertation upon the causes and sequence of tides ... [it] marked a definite step forward in tidal theory" (Waters, pp. 150-151). "The Epistola ranks as one of the most impressive scientific treatises of the Middle Ages. Not only did Peregrinus bring together… Read More

Venice: Giovanni Padovano for Curzio Troiano Navò, 1550. First edition. A MAJOR CATALYST FOR THE RESEARCHES OF GALILEO. First edition of Tartaglia's Quesiti, second edition of the other two works. The Quesiti continues the discussion of ballistics in Tartaglia's Nova scientia (first published in 1537), pointing out for the first time that the trajectory of a projectile is curved throughout (in the Nova Scientia he argued that the path of a projectile consisted of rectilinear parts at the beginning and end of the trajectory, with a curved part between). The Quesiti is also famous for containing Tartaglia's solution of cubic equations, which until a few years earlier had been considered impossible; he had kept it secret since discovering it in 1535 (Cardano had published Tartaglia's solution in his Artis magnae (1545), without his permission.) Tartaglia (1499-1557) "reshaped the character of military discourse by identifying a 'new science' of artillery and casting it as a mathematical discipline. As… Read More

London: Cambridge University Press for the Royal Society, 1952. First edition. TURING AND THE SECRET OF LIFE. First edition of the extremely rare true offprint (without price to front wrapper), of Turing's last major published work, which was "in every respect ahead of its time" (Copeland, p. 510). Taking his cue from the zoologist D'Arcy Thompson, who held that the forms of living things are to be explained in terms of the operation of physical forces and mathematical laws, Turing presents here the first mathematical theory of embryology. "At a time when Crick and Watson were using X-ray diffraction to establish the structure of DNA, Turing was grappling with a theoretical understanding of how information might be spread and diffused at a chemical level. In a classic statement of the scientific method Turing wrote: 'a mathematical model of the growing embryo will be described. This model will be a simplification and an idealisation, and consequently a falsification. It is to be hoped that the… Read More

London: Macmillan, 1966. First edition. Hardcover. THE TECTONIC CYCLE. First edition, very rare offprint, of this landmark paper elucidating the history and mechanism of continental drift by "one of the most imaginative Earth scientists of his generation" (DSB). "In 1966, J. Tuzo Wilson published 'Did the Atlantic Close and then Re-Open?' in the journal Nature. The Canadian author introduced to the mainstream the idea that continents and oceans are in continuous motion over our planet's surface. Known as plate tectonics, the theory describes the large-scale motion of the outer layer of the Earth. It explains tectonic activity (things like earthquakes and the building of mountain ranges) at the edges of continental landmasses (for instance, the San Andreas Fault in California and the Andes in South America)" (Heron). Alfred Wegener (1880-1930) had already suggested in the early 1900s that continents move around the surface of the earth, specifically that there had been a super-continent (Pangaea)… Read More

London: Printed for Thomas Bennet ... and Daniel Brown ... and are to be had of Mr. Hunt at the Repository in Gresham-College, 1699. First edition. PMM169 - THE FIRST WORK TO DEMONSTRATE THE STRUCTURAL RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN MAN AND APE. First edition, and a fine, tall copy, of "Tyson's anatomy of the 'Orang-outang' (actually a young chimpanzee), which was the first work to demonstrate scientifically the structural relationships between man and anthropoid ape" (). It was "the earliest important study in comparative morphology ... [Tyson] established a new family of anthropoid apes standing between monkey and man ... [he] did not foresee the theory of evolution, but his work contributed substantially to its formulation and in that sense he was a forerunner of Blumenbach, Buffon, Huxley and Darwin" (PMM). "For Tyson the term Orang-Outang meant 'man of the woods.' In 1641 the Dutch surgeon and anatomist Nicholas (or Nicolaes) Tulp had used the same words to describe a chimpanzee, which he illustrated in… Read More