Gabriel Cramer's copy

MAUPERTUIS, Pierre Louis Moreau de.

Discours sur la parallaxe de la lune, pour perfectionner la theorie de la lune et celle de la terre.

Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1741.

1st Edition. Hardcover. Very Good. Item #002692

8vo (193 x 120 mm). xxxii, 133 [1] pp. Woodcut title-vignette, head-piece and ornament; several woodcut diagrams in text (many full-page), letterpress tables. Bound in fine contemporary calf, spine with 5 raised bands gilt in compartments and with gilt-lettered morocco label (little rubbing and spotting to boards), marbled endpapers, red-dyed edges. Internally only very little browned, occasional minor spotting. Provenance: Prof. Gabriel Cramer, Geneva based mathematician* (armorial bookplate pasted on second flyleaf recto). A fine copy, printed on very strong paper. ----

Poggendorfff II, 85; Houzeau-L. II, 1205; Honeyman 2177; Roller-Goodman II, 173. FIRST EDITION. RARE. A discourse on methods of determining the using of the lunar parallax as an aid to navigation, dedicated to Count de Maurepas, Minister of the French Navy.
*Gabriel Cramer (1704-1752) was a Swiss mathematician, born in Geneva. At 18 he received his doctorate and at 20 he was co-chair of mathematics at the University of Geneva. In 1728 he proposed a solution to the St. Petersburg Paradox that came very close to the concept of expected utility theory given ten years later by Daniel Bernoulli. He edited the works of the two elder Bernoullis, and wrote on the physical cause of the spheroidal shape of the planets and the motion of their apsides (1730), and on Newton's treatment of cubic curves (1746). In 1750 he published Cramer's rule, giving a general formula for the solution for any unknown in a linear equation system having a unique solution, in terms of determinants implied by the system. This rule is still standard. (source: Wikipedia).

Price: 3,500 €  *  convert currency