Search Results: Titles starting with C from SOPHIA RARE BOOKS

Marburg: Caspar Chemlin, 1625. First edition. the first theoretical work on the construction of logarithms. First edition, the Macclesfield copy, of Kepler's logarithmic tables, constructed by means of his own original method. Of the greatest rarity, especially when complete with the correction leaf and the second part, which gives examples of the application of logarithms and details of their construction. It was through the use of these tables that Kepler was able to complete his monumental Tabulae Rudolphinae (1627), the superiority of which "constituted a strong endorsement of the Copernican system, and insured the tables' dominance in the field of astronomy throughout the seventeenth century" (Norman). Kepler indicated the importance of logarithms allegorically on the frontispiece to the Tabulae Rudolphinae. On the top of the temple stand six goddesses. The third from the left represents logarithms: in her hands she holds rods of the ratio of one to two, and the number around her head shows the… 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

Paris: Gabon, November 1829 (vols. 1-3 and atlas); J.-B. Balliere, 1832 (vol. 4); J.-B. Balliere, 1836 (vol. 5 and atlas), 1836. THE FOUNDATION OF MODERN MILITARY MEDICINE. First edition, extremely rare when complete with all five text volumes and their two atlases, and in superb uniform contemporary bindings, of "Larrey's longest surgical treatise, and the only one that is extensively illustrated. Most of the illustrations concern surgical pathology. The work was published over seven years, and is very rarely found complete" (Norman). Larrey (1766-1842) was the greatest military surgeon in history (Garrison-Morton 2160). He "began his medical studies with his uncle in Toulouse and, in 1787, traveled to North America. Returning to Paris, he continued his studies and during the Revolution, in 1792, was attached to the Army of the North. He eventually became principal surgeon of the French Army and thereafter followed Napoleon Bonaparte in almost all his campaigns-in Egypt, in Italy, in Germany and… Read More

[New York: The Institute of Radio Engineers, Inc.], 1949. First edition. PAVED THE WAY FOR FUTURE DEVELOPMENTS IN INFORMATION THEORY" (WYNER) - SHANNON'S OWN COPY OF THE EXTREMELY RARE OFFPRINT. First edition, Shannon's own copy of the extremely rare offprint, of this continuation and elaboration of Shannon's epoch-making 'Mathematical theory of communication'. "In 1948, C. E. Shannon published his classic paper 'A Mathematical Theory of Communication' in the Bell System Technical Journal. That paper founded the discipline of information theory ... Several months later, he published a second paper, 'Communication in the Presence of Noise,' in the Proceedings of the Institute of Radio Engineers. This second paper is ... intimately connected to the earlier classic paper. In fact, ... it can be thought of as an elaboration and extension of the earlier paper, adopting an 'engineering' rather than strict mathematical point of view. Yet, this [second] paper comprises ideas, notions, and insights that were… Read More

Philadelphia: Printed by James Kay, Jun. & Brothers, 1839. First edition. Hardcover. THE ELECTRICAL TRANSFORMER. First edition, author's presentation offprint, of the third and most important part of Henry's Contributions to Electricity and Magnetism. Following on from his discovery of electromagnetic self-induction in 1832, in the present paper Henry extends his results on 'galvanic' electricity (current produced by batteries) to the inductive effects of static electricity. Along the way, he established the principle of the electrical transformer, which was crucial to later nineteenth-century science and technology. Henry himself considered the findings reported in this paper "the most important I have ever made" (see below). OCLC lists only one copy of this offprint (Yale Medical Library). Provenance: Presentation inscription in the author's hand on the title page, "To the Rev. Professor Hitchcock with the respects of the author." The recipient is probably Edward Hitchcock (1793-1864), ordained… Read More

London: Royal Society, 1888. First edition. Hardcover. THE INVENTION OF THE STATISTICAL CONCEPT OF CORRELATION. First edition, journal issue in original printed wrappers, of Galton's invention of the statistical concept of correlation, one of the most "fundamental and ubiquitous" ideas in statistics (Stigler, p. 73). "Like all major scientific discoveries, correlation did not appear in a vacuum. It was a concluding step in a 20-year research project" (ibid.). The 'correlation coefficient' measures the strength of the linear relationship between two observed phenomena. It ranges in value from -1 to +1; the closer the correlation coefficient is to 1, the stronger the relationship. It is positive if the increase in the value of one variable may be followed by an increase in the value of the other; if it is negative the increase in the value of one variable may be followed by the decrease in the value of the other. "If one individual can be credited as the founder of the field of behavioural and… Read More

Basel: [Sebastian Henricpetri], 1628. First edition. THE MOST EXTENSIVE EDITION OF MÜNSTER'S COSMOGRAPHY . A fine copy, untouched in a contemporary binding, of the last German edition of the Cosmography, "the first modern" work of geography (Hodgen, p. 506). This, the most extensive of all the editions of Münster's great work, contains 68 maps and plans published here for the first time. Münster was a cartographer, historian, and linguist who combined his expertise to create this tour-de-force work, which "brought all the empires of man into a single meaningful progression ... [and] this single thread of history he married to geography, so that each should mirror and illuminate the other" (McLean). "Münster's first major contribution to geography dates from 1540, the year of the publication of his Latin translation of Ptolemy's Geography, illustrated with maps of his own design. Having addressed an appeal in 1528 'to all lovers of the joyful art of geography to help him in a true and correct… Read More

Landshut: Johann Weissenburger fur Petrus Apianus, 1524. First edition. IMPORTANT ASTRONOMICAL/GEOGRAPHICAL RENAISSANCE TREATISE WITH SEVERAL REFERENCES TO AMERICA. First edition, very rare, of one of the most important geographical and astronomical texts of the Renaissance, and perhaps the most significant and influential of the 16th century instrument books for navigators and travellers. "During the first half of the sixteenth century Germany was the principal center of both mathematical and descriptive geography ... [The] German school of geographers had its greatest exponents in Peter Apian (1501-52) and Sebastian Münster (1489-1552). Apian was an astronomer and mathematician; in his Cosmographicus Liber ... subsequently edited by the great Flemish mathematician Gemma Phrysius [Frisius] under the simpler title Cosmographia, he based the whole science on mathematics and measurements, following Ptolemy in making a distinction between geography (the study of the earth as a whole) and chorography… Read More

Paris: De l'imprimerie Royale, chez Debure frères, 1821. First edition. THE FIRST RIGOROUS TREATMENT OF LIMITS AND CONTINUITY. First edition, unopened in original wrappers, of this classic in the history of mathematics, which gives the first rigorous definitions of the notions of limit, continuity and convergence of infinite series, as well as the first comprehensive theory of functions of a complex variable. "In 1821, Augustin-Louis Cauchy (1787-1857) published a textbook, the Cours d'analyse, to accompany his course in analysis at the École Polytechnique. It is one of the most influential mathematics books ever written. Not only did Cauchy provide a workable definition of limits and a means to make them the basis of a rigorous theory of calculus, but he also revitalized the idea that all mathematics could be set on such rigorous foundations. Today the quality of a work of mathematics is judged in part on the quality of its rigor; this standard is largely due to the transformation brought about by… Read More

Paris: chez l'Auteur, 1675. First edition. LEMERY'S ATOMISTIC CHEMICAL TEXTBOOK - 'VERY RARE' (NEVILLE) . First edition, very rare, of the author's famous chemical textbook. "Lemery's highly successful Cours de chymie, which served as the textbook to his popular courses on chemistry, brought French chemical teaching out of the quasi-mystical Paracelsian tradition into the mainstream of Cartesian and atomistic natural philosophy. The significance of this work lies not in its originality or its thoroughness - Lemery followed very closely the works of his predecessors Le Febvre and Glaser, and did not develop any rigorous theories of matter - but rather in its attractive presentation of chemical ideas in corpuscular-mechanist terms, which contributed to the book's overwhelming popularity. Cours de chymie sold 'like a work of romance or satire' (Fontenelle, quoted in Partington); it went through numerous editions and was translated into Latin and all the major European languages" (Norman). "One of the… Read More

Cölln an der Spree: Martin Guthius, 1618. LOGARITHMS COME TO EUROPE. First edition, exceptionally rare, of the book that introduced logarithms to Continental Europe; in particular, it was through this work that Johannes Kepler, in 'a happy calamity,' as he called it, became aware of Napier's epoch-making work, a discovery that enabled him to complete his great Rudolphine Tables (1627), "the foundation of all planetary calculations for over a century" (Sparrow). "The earliest publication of Napier's logarithms on the Continent was in 1618, when Benjamin Ursinus included an excerpt from the canon, shortened by two places, in his Cursus mathematici practici. Through this work Kepler became aware of the importance of Napier's discovery and expressed his enthusiasm in a letter to Napier dated 28 July 1619, printed in the dedication of his Ephemerides (1620)" (DSB, under Napier). Ursinus assisted Kepler with the computations for the Rudolphine Tables, and Kepler presented and inscribed a copy to Ursinus… Read More

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

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

N.p.: n.d., 1780. First edition. THE FIRST GEOLOGICAL ATLAS OF FRANCE. A unique collection of maps prepared for the first geological atlas of France. "These maps, so far as I know, were the first ever constructed to express the superficial distribution of minerals and rocks. The gifted Frenchman [Guettard] who produced them is thus the father of all the national Geological Surveys which have been instituted" (Geikie, p. 115). "In 1763 the distinguished naturalist Jean Étienne Guettard, an old friend of Lavoisier's father, was advising Lavoisier and may have taken the latter under his wing as early as 1761. Guettard criticized the traditional approach to natural history and advocated a science of mineralogy supported by chemistry, topography, and physics. Since 1746 Guettard had been collecting material for a mineralogical map of France, but the task proved to be too great for a single naturalist. After Lavoisier's apprenticeship, Guettard, in 1763, decided to take the young scientist along as his… Read More