Search Results: Titles starting with R from SOPHIA RARE BOOKS

Paris: David l'ainé [Colophon: De l'imprimerie de Jean-Baptiste Coignard, imprimeur du roi], 1747. First edition. 'AN ORIGINAL WORK ... CONTAINING THE GERM OF ALL THAT HAS BEEN DONE SINCE OF THE MECHANICS OF SOLID BODIES' (LAPLACE) . First edition of one of d'Alembert's most important books, widely regarded as the foundation work of the dynamics of rigid bodies. "The precession of the equinoxes had been observed in antiquity by Hipparchus. Newton explained the cause, the astronomer Bradley detected the nutation in a series of extremely accurate observations, and d'Alembert deduced the motion from the theory of gravitation" (Hankins, p. 30). "During the late 1740s, d'Alembert, Clairaut, and Euler were all working on the famous three-body problem, with varying success. D'Alembert's interest in celestial mechanics thus led him, in 1749, to publish a masterly work, the Recherches sur la précession des equinoxes, et sur la nutation de l'axe de la terre. The precession of the equinoxes, a problem… Read More

Upsalla: W. Schultz, 1868. First edition. Soft cover. A FOUNDING WORK OF SPECTROSCOPY. First edition, a very fine copy in unrestored original printed wrappers, and rare thus, of one of the founding works of spectroscopy in which Ångström demonstrated the presence of hydrogen and a number of other elements in the sun; the atlas contains his great map of the solar spectrum. Since the plates of the atlas were simply laid in to the printed wrappers (and not sewn), the wrappers were often lost or damaged; it is rare to find these wrappers present and in fine condition as in our copy. In his Nobel Prize lecture, Arthur Schawlow (who shared the 1981 prize for his contributions to the development of laser spectroscopy) wrote: "Fraunhofer had charted the dark lines in the spectrum of the Sun, and had measured their wavelengths. But it was Ångström who first identified some of these lines as corresponding to bright lines emitted by particular substances ... Most importantly, he showed the red line of… Read More

Paris: Nyon, Didot and Quillau, 1731. First edition. THE FIRST TREATISE ON SOLID ANALYTIC GEOMETRY" (BOYER). First edition, very rare, of Clairaut's first publication, the first extended treatment of the geometry of curves in three dimensions, written when he was only sixteen. In it Clairaut demonstrates a claim made by Newton that all cubic curves in three dimensions are projections of a cubic curve of a special form. This publication led to Clairaut's election to the Académie des Sciences at the age of eighteen, the rules of admission being suspended to accommodate the mathematical prodigy. "Alexis Claude Clairaut was one of the most precocious of mathematicians, outdoing even Blaise Pascal in this respect. At the age of ten he was reading the textbooks of L'Hospital on conics and the calculus, when he was thirteen he read a paper on geometry to the Académie des Sciences ... In the year of his election Clairaut published a celebrated treatise, Recherches sur les courbesà double courbure, the… Read More

Paris: Nyon, Didot and Quillau, 1731. First edition. THE FIRST TREATISE ON SOLID ANALYTIC GEOMETRY" (BOYER). First edition, very rare, of Clairaut's first publication, the first extended treatment of the geometry of curves in three dimensions, written when he was only sixteen. In it Clairaut demonstrates a claim made by Newton that all cubic curves in three dimensions are projections of a cubic curve of a special form. This publication led to Clairaut's election to the Académie des Sciences at the age of eighteen, the rules of admission being suspended to accommodate the mathematical prodigy. "Alexis Claude Clairaut was one of the most precocious of mathematicians, outdoing even Blaise Pascal in this respect. At the age of ten he was reading the textbooks of L'Hospital on conics and the calculus, when he was thirteen he read a paper on geometry to the Académie des Sciences ... In the year of his election Clairaut published a celebrated treatise, Recherches sur les courbesà double courbure, the… Read More

Paris: Firmin-Didot et Cie, 1903. First edition. PMM 393 - THE DISCOVERY OF RADIOACTIVITY THE RARE OFFPRINT. First edition, very rare offprint, of Becquerel's definitive memoir on his discovery of and investigations into radioactivity, including his identification of electrons in radiations of radium, and his account of the evidence of a radioactive transformation. "In 1903, Becquerel published the above massive volume of some three hundred and sixty pages, 'Researches into a New Property of Matter, or Radioactivity in Matter', which is his definitive work, containing a chronological narrative of his investigations, his mature conclusions and a bibliography of two hundred and fourteen treatises on radio-activity, dating from his own first paper in 1896" (PMM). "In 1896, [Becquerel's] previous work was overshadowed by his discovery of the phenomenon of natural radioactivity. Following a discussion with Henri Poincaré on the radiation which had recently been discovered by Röntgen (X-rays) and which… Read More

Paris: Maradan, Seconde Année de la République, 1794. First edition. LAMARCK'S FIRST FULL-LENGTH TREATISE ON CHEMISTRY. First edition of the first of Lamarck's full-length treatise on chemistry, a copy with extensive near-contemporary annotations. "With the publication of the Recherches, Larmarck brought together the various strands of his work in physics and chemistry, and his views on the differences between organic and inorganic beings" (Corsi, The Age of Lamarck, pp. 47-48). "In this work Lamarck sets forth his views on the immutability of species and attacks the theory of the spontaneous origin of life. The book is interesting in the history of chemistry, because Lamarck attacks Lavoisier's anti-phlogistic theory" (Duveen). Although Lamarck's chemical theories are often dismissed because of his continued belief in the four elements, they are of interest because of their central importance in the later development of his theory of evolution. His view of the natural evolution of chemical… Read More

Paris: Bachelier, 1846. First edition. THE PREDICTION OF THE EXISTENCE OF NEPTUNE: THE RARE OFFPRINT. First edition, second offprint issue, very rare, of Le Verrier's mathematical prediction of the existence of Neptune, "undeniably one of the major scientific events of the nineteenth century" (Lequeux, p. 22). "Neptune, whose existence was visually confirmed in 1846, was the first planet to be discovered by mathematical rather than observational means. The discovery of Neptune not only represents the greatest triumph for Newton's gravitational theory since the return of Halley's Comet in 1758, but it also marks the point at which mathematics and theory, rather than observation, began to take the lead in astronomical research ... The discovery of Neptune resulted from the need to develop a theory explaining the motion of the solar system's seventh planet, Uranus, the movements of which could not be completely accounted for by the gravitational effects of Jupiter and Saturn. Several astronomers since… Read More

Paris: Crochard, 1823. DOCUMENTING THE BIRTH OF ELECTRODYNAMICS. A beautiful copy bound in contemporary red morocco of the definitive version of this continually evolving collection of important memoirs on electrodynamics by Ampère (1775-1836) and others over the period 1820-1823, beginning with his 'Premier Mémoire', the "first great memoir on electrodynamics" (DSB). "Ampère had originally intended the collection to contain all the articles published on his theory of electrodynamics since 1820, but as he prepared copy new articles on the subject continued to appear, so that the fascicles, which apparently began publication in 1821, were in a constant state of revision, with at least five versions of the collection appearing between 1821 and 1823 under different titles" (Norman). Some of the 25 pieces in the collection are published here for the first time, others appeared earlier in journals such as Arago's Annales de Chimie et de Physique and the Journal de Physique. But even the articles that… Read More

Washington: National Academy of Sciences, 1929. First edition. Hubble's Law, Redshift and the Expansion of the Universe. Extremely rare offprint issue of Hubble's landmark paper which "made as great a change in man's conception of the universe as the Copernican revolution 400 years before" (DSB). This paper "is generally regarded as marking the discovery of the expansion of the universe" (Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers). It established what would later become known as Hubble's Law: that galaxies recede from us in all directions and more distant ones recede more rapidly in proportion to their distance. "...the repercussions were immense. The galaxies were not randomly dashing through the cosmos, but instead their speeds were mathematically related to their distances, and when scientists see such a relationship they search for a deeper significance. In this case, the significance was nothing less than the realization that at some point in history all the galaxies in the universe had been… Read More

Basel: Eusebius & Heirs of Nikolaus Episcopius, 1575. First edition. Hardcover. THE FIRST WORK ON NUMBER THEORY. First edition, very rare, of the first systematic treatise on algebra (Smith, Rara Arithmetica, p. 348), which "inspired the rebirth of number theory" (Britannica), translated from the Greek by Wilhelm Holtzmann [Xylander] - the original Greek text was not published until 1621. "The appearance of [this] translation had an immediate and enormous influence on the development and shaping of Algebra'" (Heath, Diophantus of Alexandria (1910), p. 26). "The work marks the high point of Alexandrian Greek algebra: Diophantus introduced symbolism into algebra, dealt with powers as high as six (in contrast to classical Greek mathematicians, who did not consider powers higher than three), and delved extensively into the solution of indeterminate equations, founding the branch of algebra now known as Diophantine analysis" (Norman). "Xylander was an enthusiast for Diophantus, and his preface and notes… Read More

London: Smith, Elder & Co, 1847. First edition. INSCRIBED PRESENTATION COPY OF HERSCHEL'S SURVEY OF THE SOUTHERN SKY. First edition, inscribed presentation copy, of Herschel's greatest astronomical work, inscribed to the Captain of the ship that brought Herschel and his family back from South Africa. This is a monumental survey of the stars of the southern hemisphere, a complement to his father's survey of the northern celestial hemisphere. Herschel devoted five years to the project, which he chose to carry out at the Cape of Good Hope. In a suburb south of Cape Town he constructed a 20-foot reflecting telescope, with which he methodically explored the night skies. "By 1838 he had swept the whole of the southern sky, catalogued 1,707 nebulae and clusters, and listed 2,102 pairs of binary stars. He carried out star counts, on William Herschel's plan, of 68,948 stars in 3,000 sky areas ... He produced detailed sketches and maps of several objects, including the Orion region, the Eta Carinae nebula, and… Read More

Florence: Cosimo Giunti, 1615. First edition. THE BUOYANCY DISPUTE - GALILEO REPLIES TO HIS CRITICS. First edition, rare, from the Riccati library, of Galileo's principal text on the controversy over floating bodies. This work was written as a reply to two attacks by Delle Colombe (1565-1623) and Di Grazia on Galileo's 1612 treatise on floating bodies, Discorso ... intorno alle cose che stanno ub su l'acqua, o in quella si muovono. Although Galileo drafted replies to these (as well as two other polemical attacks on his treatise), this was the only one to be published. Like several of his polemics of this period, it appeared under the name of a colleague, in this case his pupil and friend Castelli (1578-1643). "Shortly after his return to Florence, Galileo became involved in a controversy over floating bodies. In that controversy an important role was played by Colombe, who became the leader of a group of dissident professors and intriguing courtiers that resented Galileo's position at court. Maffeo… Read More

Bracciano: Andreas Phaeus, 1630. First edition. EXTREMELY RARE LARGE AND THICK PAPER COPY. First edition, extremely rare large and thick paper copy, of the most lavishly illustrated astronomical work published in the first half of the seventeenth century, with many full-page illustrations of Scheiner's observations of the sun and of the optical instruments he had designed for the purpose. "For his masterpiece, Scheiner produced the first monograph on a heavenly body, the Sun. Even today it is still an impressive volume, with scores of engravings of sunspots and the various instruments needed for solar observations" (Jesuit Science in the Age of Galileo). "Scheiner's drawings in the Rosa Ursina are of almost modern quality, and there was little improvement in solar imaging until 1905" (Britannica). In this work "Scheiner agreed with Galileo that sunspots are on the Sun's surface or in its atmosphere, that they are often generated and perish there, and that the Sun is therefore not perfect. Scheiner… Read More

Paris: de l'Imprimerie Royale, chez Debure frères, 1823. First edition. PROVIDED RIGOROUS FOUNDATIONS FOR THE CALCULUS. First edition of the rarest of Cauchy's three great textbooks, which placed "the fundamental principles of the calculus on a satisfactory foundation" (Smith, History of Mathematics II, p. 700). The Résumé, often referred to as the Calcul infinitésimal, is divided into 40 lectures, the first twenty on differential calculus, the remainder on integral calculus, each lecture being precisely four pages in length (so that each lecture could be distributed to the students). It may be regarded as the second part of Cauchy's famous Cours d'analyse (1821) (see below); it gives the first rigorous treatment of calculus proper (differentiation and integration), while the Cours had covered the necessary background concepts (limits, continuity, and convergence). "Within this single text [the Résumé], Cauchy succinctly lays out and rigorously develops all of the topics one encounters in an… Read More