Books

Leiden: Jan Maire, 1637. First edition. ‘COGITO, ERGO, SUM’ (PMM 129). First edition of Descartes’ first and most famous work, and an extremely attractive copy in a strictly contemporary binding with the gilt arms of Louis Treslon-Cauchon, known as Hesselin, one of the most important and distinguished French bibliophiles of the 17th century. 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…

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.