Details
L'HOSPITAL, Guillaume Franois Antoine de (1661-1704). Analyse des infiniment petits, pour l'intelligence des lignes courbes. Paris: l'Imprimerie Royale, par les soins de Jean Anisson, 1696.
4o (250 x 181 mm). Title engraving of French royal arms, 11 numbered folding engraved plates, engraved allegorical head-pieces, one by Le Pautre, engraved tail-piece by G. Audran, engraved initials, woodcut tailpiece, one signed PLS (Pierre Le Sueur). Initial blank leaf present. (Quires M and O slightly darkened.) Contemporary vellum over pasteboard, covers panelled in blind with central blindstamped arabesque cartouche, red morocco lettering-piece on spine (covers slightly bowed).
FIRST EDITION OF THE FIRST TEXTBOOK OF THE DIFFERENTIAL CALCULUS. L'Hospital, a mathematical genius as well as a man of a "modest and generous" disposition ("two qualites that were not widespread among the mathematicians of his time" [DSB]), had been instructed in the calculus by Johann I Bernoulli in 1691. Although l'Hospital acknowledged the contributions of Bernoulli and Leibniz in his preface, which gives a short history of the development of the calculus in the preceding century, he also claimed credit for some work that Bernoulli considered his own, of which the latter complained after the author's death. "However, these foundations can be found, less explicitly, also in Leibniz, although Leibniz made it clear that he did not accept L'Hospital's Platonistic views on the reality of infinitely small and infinitely large quantities" (DSB). Whatever its precise sources, the importance of L'Hospital's work lay in its dissemination throughout Europe of the concepts and early development of the calculus, whose cause L'Hospital advanced as well through his many contacts; these included Christiaan Huygens, who is reputed to have learned the calculus from L'Hospital. A FINE COPY. Norman 1345.
4o (250 x 181 mm). Title engraving of French royal arms, 11 numbered folding engraved plates, engraved allegorical head-pieces, one by Le Pautre, engraved tail-piece by G. Audran, engraved initials, woodcut tailpiece, one signed PLS (Pierre Le Sueur). Initial blank leaf present. (Quires M and O slightly darkened.) Contemporary vellum over pasteboard, covers panelled in blind with central blindstamped arabesque cartouche, red morocco lettering-piece on spine (covers slightly bowed).
FIRST EDITION OF THE FIRST TEXTBOOK OF THE DIFFERENTIAL CALCULUS. L'Hospital, a mathematical genius as well as a man of a "modest and generous" disposition ("two qualites that were not widespread among the mathematicians of his time" [DSB]), had been instructed in the calculus by Johann I Bernoulli in 1691. Although l'Hospital acknowledged the contributions of Bernoulli and Leibniz in his preface, which gives a short history of the development of the calculus in the preceding century, he also claimed credit for some work that Bernoulli considered his own, of which the latter complained after the author's death. "However, these foundations can be found, less explicitly, also in Leibniz, although Leibniz made it clear that he did not accept L'Hospital's Platonistic views on the reality of infinitely small and infinitely large quantities" (DSB). Whatever its precise sources, the importance of L'Hospital's work lay in its dissemination throughout Europe of the concepts and early development of the calculus, whose cause L'Hospital advanced as well through his many contacts; these included Christiaan Huygens, who is reputed to have learned the calculus from L'Hospital. A FINE COPY. Norman 1345.