Milestones of Science Books

MOIVRE, Abraham de.

Miscellanea analytica de seriebus et quadraturis.

London: J. Tonson & J. Watts, 1730.

1st Edition. Hardcover. Good. Item #001827

4to (235x190 mm). [12], 250 [2] pp., contemporary half calf (rebacked, extremities worn), gilt label to spine, mild browning and foxing throughout, old markings and ink annotations in text (some trimmed at the time binding), occasional ink smudges, leaf S1 torn at top margin with loss of a few headline letters, leaf Ff4 torn at lower corner without loss of text, old handwritten comments in Latin to front flyleaf. All in all a fair copy of a rare work. ----

Cantor III, 622ff., DSB IX, 452ff., Norman 131. - FIRST EDITION of Moivre's first published attempt at approximating the terms of a binomial expansion, or the normal approximation to the binomial distribution. This anonymous work is often regarded as the original appearance of the 'normal curve.' He later completed his attempt and published his solution in a pamphlet entitled Approximatio ad summam terminorum binomii (a + b)o in seriem expansi (1733). 'Moivre's discovery greatly clarified the concept of probability in his own time, and became the most fruitful single instrument of discovery used in probability theory and statistics for the next two centuries' (Norman).

Price: 2,800 €  *  convert currency