Books

Leiden: Jan Maire, 1637. First edition. PMM 129 – THE INVENTION OF ANALYTIC GEOMETRY. First edition, a fine, large copy, of Descartes’ first and most famous work. Following the Discours, now celebrated as one of the canonical texts of Western philosophy, are three ‘Essais’, the last of which, La Géométrie, contains the birth of analytical or co-ordinate geometry, “of epoch-making importance” (Cajori, History of Mathematics, p. 174), designated by John Stuart Mill as “the greatest single step ever made in the progress of the exact sciences”. It “rendered possible the later achievements of seventeenth-century mathematical physics” (Hall, Nature and nature’s laws (1970), p. 91). The first of the Essais, La Dioptrique, contains Descartes’ discovery of ‘Snell’s law’ of refraction of light (earlier than Snell); the second, Les Météores, contains Descartes’ explanation of the rainbow, based on the optical theories developed in the first Essai. “It is no…

A work published in 1637 by René Descartes, where he introduced the concept of analytical geometry, which is the study of geometry using algebra and the Cartesian coordinate system.