Search Results: Titles starting with I from Atticus Rare Books

New York: AAAS, 2009. 1st Edition. Chang shows that oxygen isotope records of stalagmites in China allows correlation of records of the 4 past glacial terminations with ice cores, establishing the timing of major events. "Th-dated oxygen isotope records of stalagmites from Sanbao Cave, China, characterize Asian Monsoon (AM) precipitation through the ends of the third- and fourthmost recent ice ages. As a result, AM records for the past four glacial terminations can now be precisely correlated with those from ice cores and marine sediments, establishing the timing and sequence of major events. In all four cases, observations are consistent with a classic Northern Hemisphere summer insolation intensity trigger for an initial retreat of northern ice sheets. Meltwater and icebergs entering the North Atlantic alter oceanic and atmospheric circulation and associated fluxes of heat and carbon, causing increases in atmospheric CO2 and Antarctic temperatures that drive the termination in the Southern… Read More

Harper & Brothers, 1937. 1st Edition. In November 1936, H.G. Wells delivered a lecture at The Royal Institution wherein her first presented the idea of a world encyclopedia. Following the lecture and also in 1936, Wells "issued a pamphlet of 32 pages entitled The Idea of a World Encyclopaedia" (Norman, History of Information). The first large publication of the lecture was appeared in the April 1937 issue of Harper's offered here. Wells begins by a statement on his preference for cohesive worldviews rather than isolated facts. Correspondingly, he wishes the world to be such a whole "as coherent and consistent as possible" (Harper's, p. 472). He believed that 20th century encyclopedias had "failed to adapt to both the growing increase in recorded knowledge and the expansion of people requiring information that was accurate and readily accessible. He [asserted] that these 19th-century encyclopedias continue to follow the 18th-century pattern, organization and scale" arguing that they were essentially… Read More

Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION IN ORIGINAL WRAPS OF BLACKBURN & GRIEDER'S NOBEL PRIZE WINNING PAPER REPORTING THE DISCOVERY OF THE ENZYME NOW KNOWN AS ‘TELOMERASE'. The award of the Nobel Prize recognizes the discovery of a fundamental mechanism in the cell, a discovery that has stimulated the development of new therapeutic strategies. As a side note, this work is cited in Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Dr. Carol Greider and Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn played an important roll in solving a significant problem in biology, namely, "how the chromosomes can be copied in a complete way during cell divisions and how they are protected against degradation. The Nobel Laureates have shown that the solution is to be found in the ends of the chromosomes - the telomeres - and in an enzyme that forms them - telomerase" (Nobel Prize Portal). " The long, thread-like DNA molecules that carry our genes are packed into chromosomes, the telomeres being the caps on their… Read More

The Association of Symbolic Logic. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION IN ORIGINAL WRAPS, two papers (in two separate issues), of Jaako Hintikka's systematic investigation of Wittgensteinian predicate logic (W-logic), the first ever performed. Jaakko Hintikka (1929-2015) was a Finnish philosopher known for his work in logic and epistemology. He was awarded the Rolf Schook Prize in Logic & Philosophy in 2005, "widely viewed as the Nobel of its field. He is also one of only four philosophers this century to be the subject of a volume of the Library of Living Philosophers" (The Philosophers' Magazine 40, 2008, 44). "Hintikka's development of systems of modal logic, the logic of knowledge, and game-theoretic semantics was inspired in part by the Tractatus, and in part by Wittgenstein's notion of a language game" (Shapiro, Oxford Handbook, 114). In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein wrote: ‘Identity of the object I express by identity of the sign and not by means of a sign of identity. Difference of the objects by… Read More

Washington DC: The American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2006. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION IN ORIGINAL PICTORIAL WRAPPERS OF A NOBEL PRIZE WINNING PAPER BY ERIC BETZIG. In 2014, Betzig, along with Stefan Hell and William Moerner, won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for figuring out a way to see single molecules, something most in the scientific community believed could never be done. Their work has allowed scientists "to see molecules in action within a living cell, watch DNA being put together, and follow the actions of proteins involved in Huntington's disease and Alzheimer's disease" (Fischman, Scientific American, October 8, 2014). Optical microscopy has been "held back by a presumed limitation: that it would never obtain a better resolution than half the wavelength of light. Helped by fluorescent molecules the Nobel Laureates ingeniously circumvented this limitation;" their work has brought optical microscopy into the nanodimension" (Nobel Prize Committee). Working independently,… Read More

1870. 1st Edition. OFFPRINT, INSCRIBED FROM THE AUTHOR TO EDMOND BECQUEREL (but not signed). First separate edition in original printed wraps from the Annals of the Lyceum of Natural History. This is the first of a series of radium bibliographies by Bolton; while later works in the series can be found, this issue is scarce. OCLC lists only 10 copies. Henry Carrington Bolton was a chemist and bibliographer of science. His bibliographies were well respect. Alexandre-Edmond Becquerel (1820-1891) known as Edmond Becquerel, was a French physicist who studied the solar spectrum, magnetism, electricity, and optics. He is credited with the unraveling the key operating principle of solar energy cells - the discovery of the photovoltaic effect -- in 1839. He was especially interested in phosphorescence and luminescence, chemical reactions caused by exposing certain substances to light. In the1840s he found that these reactions could produce an electric current in both liquids and metals. The connection… Read More

Baltimore: Physiological Researches, 1913. 1st Edition. SCARCE 1913 FIRST EDITION, OFFPRINT ISSUE. "This study has to do with the influence of one salt in altering the toxic effect of another upon fungus spores. It is shown that the toxic effect of copper nitrate on the germination of Gloeosporium spores can be inhibited or modified by the addition to the medium of calcium nitrate and that the molecular ratio of the quantity of the calcium salt thus required to the amount of copper nitrate present increases with the concentration of the latter." CONDITION & DETAILS: Baltimore: Physiological Researches. The Influence of Calcium, Magnesium and Potassium Nitrates Upon the Toxicity of Certain Heavy Metals Toward Fungus Spores Physiological Researches, Vol. I, No. 2, August, 1913, pp. 57-92. Bound in original paper wraps with very minor darkening on the rear. Very good condition in every way.

London: Taylor and Francis. FIRST EDITION OF THE FIRST PUBLISHED DESCRIPTION OF BOYS' INTEGRAPH, AN ANALOG COMPUTING DEVICE THAT MECHANICALLY PLOTTED THE INTEGRAL OF A GRAPHICALLY DEFINED FUNCTION. Sir Charles Vernon Boys (1855-1944) was an innovative, fastidious, British physicist and inventor who received many honors and awards. A noteworthy development in the history of calculating instruments, Boys elaborated and extended the idea of a planimeter, a simpler and earlier instrument used to measure area. While still a student, Boys designed an integraph, a mechanical instrument capable of drawing the antiderivative of a given mathematical function. Boys' instrument drew "an ‘integral curve' when a pointer [was] passed round the periphery of a figure whose area is required" - meaning it could graphically solve simple differential equations (Cajori, History of Mathematics, 486). The paper offered here contains Boys' first published description of his invention. In the 17th century, Leibniz… Read More

Lancaster: American Physical Society, 1986. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION IN ORIGINAL PRINTED PAPER WRAPS OF TWO EXTENSIVE & WELL-REGARDED SURVEY PAPERS: the first, the German physicist H. Paul's comprehensive review of investigations, both theoretical and experimental, demonstrating photon interference even when the fields involved are produced by independent sources; the second, the American astronomer Craig Sarazin's important review on the interaction between gas and galaxies in clusters. PAUL'S PAPER demonstrates that "experiments with two independent light sources have shown that a photon from one source can interfere with a photon from the other source" and that "problems appear with Dirac's dictum interference effects produced by light beams from two completely independent sources" are taken into account (Honig, Quantum Uncertainties, 340; (Progress in Optics, Vol. 36, 67). More specifically, Paul's work makes clear that "for two-slit systems that use two independent laser sources with brief (

New York: American Institute of Physics, 1972. 1st Edition. BOUND FIRST EDITION OF ANTHONY JAMES LEGGETT'S NOBEL PRIZE WINNING PAPER ON THE SUPERFLUIDITY OF HELIUM-3, "one of the holy grails of condensed matter physics" (Bishop, Recent Progress in Many-Body Theories, 4). Widely regarded as a world leader in low-temperature physics, in this paper Leggett "explains how atoms interact with one another in a superfluid"; specifically, he details "the anomalous superfluidity of helium-3...using the principles of quantum mechanics (Nndb). Leggett's work in this paper greatly advanced our understanding of how matter transitions from one phase to another (Rezende, Chronology of Science, 396). This volume also contains Osheroff, Richardson, Gully and Lee's Nobel Prize winning discovery of superfluidity in helium-3. In the 1920s, physicists discovered "that when isotopes of helium are cooled to extremely low temperatures they lose all viscosity, a property called superfluidity" (Rezende). Leggett's research… Read More

1913 FIRST EDITION of a short letter to the editor of Nature in which Frederick Soddy presents his theory of isotopes to designate chemically identical elements with different atomic weights and first uses the term 'isotope' in print -- work for which he would later win the Nobel Prize. "In 1913, only the barest outlines of the structure of the atom had been drawn. Frederick Soddy, although struggling to understand how an electron could be emitted from the nucleus during beta-decay, supported the conclusions of A. van de Broeck -- that an element's atomic number, not its atomic weight, is the fundamental parameter determining chemical properties. Soddy introduced the word 'isotope' for elements that occupy the same place in the periodic table and hence have identical properties, though different mass. He also contested "Rutherford's tentative theory" that the nucleus has only positive charge. One week later [ALSO in this volume], a rather indignant Ernest Rutherford responded: the nucleus has… Read More

London: The Royal Society, 1944. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION OFFPRINT IN ORIGINAL WRAPS OF A PAPER BY LITTLEWOOD ON INVARIANT THEORY. Offprints are prized because they are separately printed by journals and frequently issued in small quantities intended only for the author's use and distribution to colleagues. "Dudley Ernest Littlewood was a British mathematician known for his work in group representation theory. He worked on invariant theory and group representation theory, especially of the symmetric group, often in collaboration with Archibald Read Richardson of Swansea. They introduced the immanant of a matrix, studied Schur functions and developed the Littlewood-Richardson rule for their multiplication. Littlewood was also interested in the application of representation theory to quantum mechanics" (Wikipedia). CONDITION & DETAILS: Complete. 4to. (12 x 9 inches, 300 x 225mm). Original wraps with minor toning at the edges of the front wrap. Very slight chipping at the head of the spine. Bright… Read More

London: Macmillan Limited, 1965. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION IN ORIGINAL WRAPS OF A "CLASSIC" PAPER ON THE PROBLEM OF CAPITAL BUDGETING, THE 1965 BAUMOL-QUANDT MODEL. Project selection is a major problem in managerial decision making. Capital budgeting problems determine which project to fund given constraints on available capital. This much studied paper presents the Baumol-Quandt Model [also known as the Baumol and Quandt Problem]; in it Baumol and Quandt apply tools of mathematical programming to the topic of capital budgeting and present their approach for making project selections to maximize value. Note that we separately offer a related paper that came ten years earlier, the Lorie-Savage Problem paper ("Three Problems in Capital Rationing" in The Journal of Business 28, 8, October 1955, pp. 229-240). Lorie and Savage use integer programming (Lagrangian methods in discrete optimization approach) to introduce the topic of capital budgeting and present their approach for making project… Read More