Search Results: Authors starting with W from SOPHIA RARE BOOKS

Washington: National Defense Research Committee, 1944. First edition. THE INVENTION OF SEQUENTIAL ANALYSIS - THE ORIGINAL RESTRICTED REPORTS. First edition, very rare, of Wald's seminal invention of 'Sequential analysis', developed while he was in charge of Columbia University's Statistical Research Group in response to the demand for more efficient methods of industrial quality control during World War II. It is here offered in the original 'restricted' reports; it was published four years later in his well-known book of the same title. "Wald's second major achievement in mathematical statistics is sequential analysis. The notion that in some sense it is economical to observe and analyze data sequentially, rather than to observe and analyze a single sample of predetermined fixed size, was not a new one. Intuitive support for this notion is immediate; if the evidence shown in sequentially unfolding data is sharply one-sided, it seems reasonable to believe that the inquiry can be terminated early,… Read More

London: William Godbid for Moses Pitt, 1671. First edition. A MAJOR ADVANCE IN THE MATHEMATIZATION OF MECHANICS" (DSB). First edition, very rare when complete with the portrait and all three parts, of this classic treatise on mechanics by Newton's most important English precursor. It treats both statics (the balance, the lever, centres of gravity, elasticity, and hydrostatics) and dynamics (including the motion of bodies under gravity, and the first comprehensive treatment of the collision of both hard and elastic bodies). "On these investigations, according to Professor Mach, Sir Isaac Newton based his researches contained in the Principia" (Sotheran 5188). All three of 'Newton's' laws of motion are stated in the Machanica, almost two decades before the publication of the Principia. "The first part deals with various forms of motion in a strictly 'geometrical', that is, Euclidean, manner, starting with definitions followed by propositions. The motion of bodies under the action of gravity is covered… Read More

St. Albans: Fisher, Knight & Co, 1953. First edition. DISCOVERY OF THE STRUCTURE OF DNA. SIGNED BY ALL BUT ONE OF THE AUTHORS. First edition, offprint, signed by Watson, Crick, Wilkins, Gosling, Stokes & Wilson, i.e. six of the seven authors. We know of no copy signed by Franklin, and strongly doubt that any such copy exists. Furthermore this copy is, what we believe to be, just one of three copies signed by six authors. One of the most important scientific papers of the twentieth century, which "records the discovery of the molecular structure of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), the main component of chromosomes and the material that transfers genetic characteristics in all life forms. Publication of this paper initiated the science of molecular biology. Forty years after Watson and Crick's discovery, so much of the basic understanding of medicine and disease has advanced to the molecular level that their paper may be considered the most significant single contribution to biology and medicine in the… Read More

London: Macmillan, 1953. First edition. ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERIES OF THE 20TH CENTURY. First edition, in the form in which it first appeared, of one of the most important scientific papers of the twentieth century, which "records the discovery of the molecular structure of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), the main component of chromosomes and the material that transfers genetic characteristics in all life forms. Publication of this paper initiated the science of molecular biology. Forty years after Watson and Crick's discovery, so much of the basic understanding of medicine and disease has advanced to the molecular level that their paper may be considered the most significant single contribution to biology and medicine in the twentieth century" (One Hundred Books Famous in Medicine, p. 362). The paper ended with one of the most famous understatements in the history of science: "It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a… Read More

Gotha: Justus Perthes, 1912. First edition. Hardcover. CONTINENTAL DRIFT. First edition, journal issues in the original printed wrappers. "Wegener is remembered today as the originator and one of the chief proponents of the theory of continental drift, which he conceived after being struck by the apparent correspondence in the shapes of the coastlines on the west and east sides of the Atlantic, and supported with extensive research on the geological and paleontological correspondences between the two sides. He postulated that 200 million years ago there existed a supercontinent ('Pangaea'), which began to break up during the Mesozoic era due to the cumulative effects of the 'Eötvös force,' which drives continents towards the equator, and the tidal attraction of the sun and moon, which drags the earth's crust westward with respect to its interior. Wegener's drift mechanism was later shown to be untenable; it has been replaced by the idea of convection currents in the earth's upper mantle. Wegener's… Read More

Leipzig: Siegfried Lebrecht Crusius, 1774. First edition. EVANS 64 - "THE FIRST MODERN TEXTBOOK ON MINERALOGY". First edition, rare, of Werner's first published work and the first modern textbook of descriptive mineralogy (the 'fossils' in the title refer to anything removed from the ground). "Although Werner is best known for his contribution to the founding of geology as a science, he first achieved recognition as a mineralogist. He considered mineralogy to be the basis for all study of the earth, dividing it into five branches, of which geognosy (historical geology) was one and oryctognosy (descriptive mineralogy) another. And during all the years in which his theories on geognosy were arousing so much interest and controversy, he continued to work on his mineral system, the final version of which appeared after his death in 1817. His first important mineralogical work, however, Von den äusserlichen Kennzeichen der Fossilien, was not a mineral system but a classification of external… Read More

Cambridge: at the University Press, 1913. First edition. 'THE GREATEST SINGLE CONTRIBUTION TO LOGIC SINCE ARISTOTLE' . First edition of this monumental work, one of the great rarities of modern science and mathematics, "the greatest single contribution to logic that has appeared in the two thousand years since Aristotle" (DNB). "In this monumental study of logic and set theory, Russell and Whitehead took up the task ... of proving the logical basis of all mathematics by deducing the whole body of mathematical doctrine from a small number of primitive ideas and principles of logical inference. To do so, Russell and Whitehead devised a complex but precise system of symbols that enabled them to sidestep the ambiguities of ordinary language, and to give an exposition of sentential logic that has hardly been improved upon since" (Norman). Probably named after Isaac Newton's great work, Principia Mathematica "has had an influence, direct and indirect, of near Newtonian proportions upon the spheres of its… Read More

[Washington, DC: National Defense Research Council], 1942. First edition. The 'Yellow Peril'. Extremely rare first edition of this classic work which laid the foundations of modern communication and control theory. "It has been the opinion of many that Wiener will be remembered for his Extrapolation long after Cybernetics is forgotten. Indeed few computer-science students would know today what cybernetics is all about, while every communication student knows what Wiener's filter is. The work was circulated as a classified memorandum in 1942 [offered here], as it was connected with sensitive war-time efforts to improve radar communication. This book became the basis for modern communication theory, by a scientist considered one of the founders of the field of artificial intelligence. Combining ideas from statistics and time-series analysis, Wiener used Gauss's method of shaping the characteristic of a detector to allow for the maximal recognition of signals in the presence of noise. This method came… Read More

Berlin: Weidmann, 1932. First edition. PARITY AND TIME-REVERSAL IN QUANTUM MECHANICS. First edition, very rare offprints, of these two fundamental papers in quantum mechanics, the "invention of spatial parity as a quantum mechanical conserved quantity [I] [and the] introduction of the time inversion transformation in quantum mechanics [II]" (). "Wigner was invited to Göttingen in 1927 to become Hilbert's assistant. Hilbert, already interested in quantum mechanics, felt that he needed a physicist as an assistant to complement his own expertise. This was an important time for Wigner who produced papers of great depth and significance, introducing in his paper 'On the conservation laws of quantum mechanics' (1927) [I] the new concept of parity" (). "Wigner performed pioneering work by studying such symmetries in the laws of motion for the electrons and had made important discoveries by investigating e.g., those symmetries which express the fact that the laws mentioned make no difference between left… Read More

Nuremberg: Johann Petri, 1535. First edition. THE FIRST COMPREHENSIVE EUROPEAN TREATISE ON OPTICS. First edition, rare, a copy with numerous early annotations, of the first comprehensive European treatise on optics, and the first work to contain descriptions of medieval laboratory instruments. Witelo (born ca. AD 1230) begins with the geometrical theorems required for the optical demonstrations of the remaining books. He details the essential features of optical systems, including the theory of the nature of light and its propagation, reflection by plain and curved mirrors, light, colour, perspective, the rainbow, etc. Witelo's principal source was the Optics of Ibn al-Haytham; the present text, Witelo's Perspectiva, is thus the first printed source for Ibn al-Haytham's work, which was not published until 1572 (when it accompanied a reprint of Witelo's text). "The most outstanding feature of Witelo's method was his combination of manual and technical skill with mathematics for quantitative… Read More