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NAPIER, John (1550-1617). Mirifici logarithmorum canonis description. Edinburgh: Andrew Hart, 1614.
4o (196 x 143 mm). Woodcut title-page border, numerous woodcut diagrams in text. (A2-3 with upper and lower margins renewed, some pale spotting.) 19th-century blue straight-grained morocco, covers tooled in blind, gilt-lettered on spine, edges gilt, by Lewis. Provenance: Samuel V. Hoffman (signature dated 1900 on front flyleaf; bookplate; presentation bookplate to the New York Historical Society Library, 21 April 1943; sale Christie's London, 12 November 1975, lot 97).
EXCEEDINGLY RARE FIRST EDITION, FIRST ISSUE, PRESENTING NAPIER'S INVENTION OF LOGARITHMS. This copy is of the first issue, with m1 verso blank and pages 14-15 misnumbered 22-23, respectively. The second issue contains an "Admonitio" on M1v stating the author's intention of publishing an improved form of logarithm, and the pagination is often corrected.
"His 'Description of the Wonderful Table of Logarithms' is unique in the history of science in that a great discovery was the result of the unaided original speculation of one individual without precursors and almost without contemporaries in his field. Napier began work on his tables in 1594, but it was twenty years before he was ready to publish them, in this thin quarto volume of ninety pages" (PMM). Napier's logarithms reduced multiplication and division to a simple process of addition and subtraction, and the extraction of roots to division. "The idea of using logarithms in mathematics was accepted almost instantly, and the slide rule, one of the most important offspring of logarithms, lasted for more than 300 years, until solid-state electronics finally replaced it" (Shurkin, p. 30). Napier's invention was immediately adopted by mathematicians both in England and on the continent, including Briggs and Ursinus, who introduced logarithms to Kepler.
The book's impact on the art of navigation cannot be underestimated: "Probably no work has ever influenced science as a whole, and mathematics in particular, so profoundly as this modest little book. It opened the way for the abolition, once and for all, of the infinitely laborious, nay, nightmarish, processes of long division and multiplication, of finding the power and the root of numbers..." (D.W. Waters, The Art of Navigation in England in Elizabethan and Early Stuart Times, New Haven, 1958, p.402). Henry Briggs saw the immense power of Napier's tool and "with his strong navigational bent" put the work into English so that it could be "of very great use for Mariners... a booke of more than ordinary worth, especially for Sea-Men" (Waters, p.404). Dibner Heralds of Science 106; Grolier/Horblit 77a; Norman 1573; PMM 116; Joel Shurkin, Engines of the Mind: A History of the Computer, (New York, 1984), pp. 28-31; STC 18349.
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EXCEEDINGLY RARE FIRST EDITION, FIRST ISSUE, PRESENTING NAPIER'S INVENTION OF LOGARITHMS. This copy is of the first issue, with m1 verso blank and pages 14-15 misnumbered 22-23, respectively. The second issue contains an "Admonitio" on M1v stating the author's intention of publishing an improved form of logarithm, and the pagination is often corrected.
"His 'Description of the Wonderful Table of Logarithms' is unique in the history of science in that a great discovery was the result of the unaided original speculation of one individual without precursors and almost without contemporaries in his field. Napier began work on his tables in 1594, but it was twenty years before he was ready to publish them, in this thin quarto volume of ninety pages" (PMM). Napier's logarithms reduced multiplication and division to a simple process of addition and subtraction, and the extraction of roots to division. "The idea of using logarithms in mathematics was accepted almost instantly, and the slide rule, one of the most important offspring of logarithms, lasted for more than 300 years, until solid-state electronics finally replaced it" (Shurkin, p. 30). Napier's invention was immediately adopted by mathematicians both in England and on the continent, including Briggs and Ursinus, who introduced logarithms to Kepler.
The book's impact on the art of navigation cannot be underestimated: "Probably no work has ever influenced science as a whole, and mathematics in particular, so profoundly as this modest little book. It opened the way for the abolition, once and for all, of the infinitely laborious, nay, nightmarish, processes of long division and multiplication, of finding the power and the root of numbers..." (D.W. Waters, The Art of Navigation in England in Elizabethan and Early Stuart Times, New Haven, 1958, p.402). Henry Briggs saw the immense power of Napier's tool and "with his strong navigational bent" put the work into English so that it could be "of very great use for Mariners... a booke of more than ordinary worth, especially for Sea-Men" (Waters, p.404). Dibner Heralds of Science 106; Grolier/Horblit 77a; Norman 1573; PMM 116; Joel Shurkin, Engines of the Mind: A History of the Computer, (New York, 1984), pp. 28-31; STC 18349.