Search Results: Titles starting with F from SOPHIA RARE BOOKS

Pasadena, CA: The California Institute of Technology, 1963. First edition. FEYNMAN'S LECTURES ON PHYSICS- EXTREMELY RARE PRE-PUBLICATION ISSUE. Extremely rare pre-publication issue of a section of Feynman's legendary lectures on physics, namely that devoted to electromagnetism, from Maxwell's equations to the optical and magnetic properties of materials, and concluding with four lectures on elasticity and fluid flow. According to the curators of Caltech's Feynman Lectures website (), this preliminary edition was produced by Caltech's graphics department between the end of the 1962-1963 academic year and the beginning of the 1963-64 academic year. It is copyrighted 1963, one year before the first published edition of the Feynman lectures, produced by Addison-Wesley. No more than 300 copies of this pre-publication edition were printed. This section of the Feynman Lectures is a record of part of the second year's lectures, which were given to the sophomore class during the 1962-1963 academic year (all… Read More

Turin: Stamperia Reale, 1837. First edition. Hardcover. A LANDMARK FOR THE HISTORY OF ITALIAN SCIENCE" (MORSELLI). First edition of one of the great rarities of chemistry, and especially rare in the original printed wrappers as here. This monumental work is the only large-scale publication of Avogadro (1776-1856), famous for his eponymous hypothesis (1811) that equal volumes of all gases at the same pressure and temperature contain the same number of molecules. "Avogadro also wrote a large book [offered here] which was read with interest by Faraday and contains an account of his hypothesis" (Partington, History of Chemistry IV, p. 216). Although his molecular hypothesis is widely considered to be Italy's great contribution to chemistry in the 19th century, his 1811 memoir was largely ignored for another half century, partly because it was published first in Italian (when Italy was at the periphery of scientific research) and subsequently only in minor French, German and English scientific journals.… Read More

Cambridge: [the University Press for the Cambridge Philosophical Society, 1835. DARWIN'S FIRST SEPARATELY PRINTED WORK - INSCRIBED. First edition, very rare, inscribed by John Stevens Henslow, of Darwin's first separately printed work and his first account in print of his discoveries on the Beagle. "During his five-year voyage on HMS Beagle, Darwin maintained a correspondence with John Stevens Henslow, his mentor in natural history and lifelong friend; it was Henslow who had obtained for Darwin the post of ship's naturalist on the Beagle. The present pamphlet contains extracts made by Henslow from ten of Darwin's letters" (Norman). Henslow had this pamphlet printed without Darwin's knowledge for distribution amongst the members of the Cambridge Philosophical Society "in consequence of the interest which has been excited by some of the Geological notices which they contain, and which were read at a Meeting of the Society on the 16th of November 1835" (p. [1]), an act which secured Darwin's reputation… Read More

[Lancaster, PA & New York, NY: American Institute of Physics for the American Physical Society, 1939. First edition. PRESENTATION OFFPRINT INSCRIBED BY FEYNMAN. First edition, extremely rare offprint, inscribed by Feynman, of Feynman's senior undergraduate thesis at MIT, a fundamental discovery "that has played an important role in theoretical chemistry and condensed matter physics" (Selected Papers, p. 1), published when he was just twenty-one. This is a remarkable paper, documenting the first steps in original research of one of the most brilliant minds of the twentieth century. "Feynman was one of the most creative and influential physicists of the twentieth century. A veteran of the Manhattan Project of World War II and a 1965 Nobel laureate in physics, he made lasting contributions across many domains, from electrodynamics and quantum theory to nuclear and particle physics, solid-state physics, and gravitation" (DSB). Feynman showed that "the force on an atom's nucleus is no more or less than… Read More

London: Printed for R. and J. Dodsley, 1756. First edition. Hardcover. NEWTON'S SPECULATIONS. First printing, very rare, of these letters of Newton which Koyré has described as "one of the most precious and important documents for the study and interpretation of Newtonian thought" (Koyré, Newtonian Studies (1965), p. 202). Newton here gives his views on the nature of gravity, on the formation of the solar system, on action-at-a-distance, and much else. He even foresaw in these letters the modern theory of galaxy formation (see below). Newton had been very careful to exclude such speculative 'philosophical' comments from Principia: in its second edition he famously proclaimed "Hypotheses non fingo," or "I feign no hypotheses." Bentley had been asked to deliver the inaugural series of Boyle Lectures, which "had to demonstrate, among other things, that the new science - that is to say, the 'mechanical philosophy' of which Boyle had been so firm an adherent, and the heliocentric astronomy - which had… Read More

Jena: Hermann Pohle, 1891. First edition. Hardcover. THE PHILOSOPHICAL FOUNDATION OF THE BEGRIFFSSCHRIFT. First edition, very rare, of this important essay, in which Frege carried out a revision of his famous Begriffsschrift (1879), which was necessary in order to carry out his programme of reducing arithmetic to formal logic. Function und Begriff contains Frege's two main innovations since the publication of Begriffsschrift, namely the notion of 'sense' and his 'Basic Law V' (see Alnes, p. 1). Function und Begriff also contains the earliest traceable germ of the ideas that lead to the modern formalism of functional grammars and to the Church-Kleene lambda calculus of the 1930s that was to play such an important role in the development of the theory of programming languages (see, for example, Klement). Together with his two subsequent papers, Über Sinn und Bedeutung (1892) and Über Begriff und Gegenstand (1892), Function und Begriff was incorporated into his magnum opus, Die Grundgesetze der… Read More