Books

London: printed for Jacob Tonson, 1734. First edition. ‘The most spectacular event of the century in the history of British mathematics’. First edition of Berkeley’s famous attack on the calculus of Newton and Leibniz, which the historian Florian Cajori described as “the most spectacular event of the century in the history of British mathematics” (History of the Calculus, p. 57), bound with Berkeley’s important Theory of Vision (1733) and Defence of Free-Thinking in Mathematics (1735), and five further pamphlets. “The Analyst is a criticism of the calculus, in both its Newtonian and Leibnizian formulations, arguing that the foundations of the calculus are incoherent and the reasoning employed inconsistent. Berkeley’s powerful objections provoked numerous responses, and the task of replying to them set the agenda for much of British mathematics in the 1730s and 1740s” (Jesseph, p. 121). Perhaps the most famous passage in the book (p. 59), and a vivid example of…