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Synthesis of Electronic Computing and Computing Controls. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1952. 1st edition. 4to. Synthesis of Electronic Computing and Computing Controls, by “the Staff of the Computation Laboratory”, Harvard University Press, Harvard Annals of Computation #27, 1951, (first edition, revised, 1952). Fine copy in a good (only) dustjacket. In this work the staff of the Computation Laboratory sought to address the problem of “adequate mathematical methods for the investigation of the functional behavior of electronic control circuits” which “ represented the largest single obstacle to the rapid development of the subject…” (quotes from the preface by Howard Aiken). “The IBM ASCC or the Harvard Mark I was the first of a series of four computers associated with Howard Aiken. Mark I and Mark II were electromagnetic, using relays but Mark III and Mark IV had a variety of electronic components including vacuum tubes and solid-state transistors. Of the four, Mark I was the most memorable because it produced such reliable results and could run continuously for twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. The Mark III was the first computer to appear on the cover of Time magazine”. (http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~history/50th/MarkIII.Time.jpg) John A.N. Lee, from IEEE Annals of the History of Computing The lines of computing machines that had their origin in the days immediately preceding World War II include a series of calculators Howard Aiken, a professor of applied mathematics at Harvard University, designed. Starting with the Mark I in 1944, Aiken spearheaded an effort that provided not only the physical means of computation but also the tools to direct them and the people to operate them. The third in this sequence of machines was an innovation in design and implementation, while at the same time being conservative in the selection of components. The Harvard Mark III Calculator had the potential to be a significant entry into the field of computing, but events slowed its completion until competitors finished other markedly superior systems. The Mark III was not a machine that would be emulated or replicated beyond its lifetime, but the people who planned it, built it, programmed it, and operated it went on to make significant contributions to the science and practice of computing. (Book ID 22760) $200.00

Hagelin, . The Hagelin Cryptographers, an Analysis, CONFIDENTIAL. New York: Ericsson Telephone, 1942. 28pp Very good condition. Mimeographed sheets, stapled. Confidential. 11x8, 19pp. Offset, typed document. Stamped "Accessions Division, Nov 11, 1942, Library of Congress". With an accompanying cover letter with the rubberstamp of Ericsson Telephone, Sales Corp, NYC., and dated July 3, 1942. This is a general report on the origin, development and status of the Hagelin "cryptographers"-a word used here to describe the physical machines (rather than the people working on codes). Sections in the document include "Models Built at Express Demand of the French Authorities", "Evolution of Hand Cryptographer Type C-362", "Hagelin Cryptographer Models" (BC-38 and C-362), "Methods of Operation", "Superiority of Hagelin Cryptographers over Competing Makes", and others, including a final section "How to Sell Cryptographers". There is a mention of the "Enigma" machine on page 14, which is limited to mentioning that it is not sold outside of Germany. Although the Swiss firm founded by Boris Hagelin has manufactured, and continues to manufacture, many kinds of cipher machines, the words "Hagelin machine" will normally inspire thoughts of their unique lug and pin based machines. The basic principle of a Hagelin lug and pin machine is easy enough to describe. In the C-38, used by the U.S. Army as the M-209, six pinwheels, with 17, 19, 21, 23, 25, and 26 positions on them, can be set by the user with an arbitrary series of pins that are active. For every letter enciphered, all the pinwheels rotate one space. The combination of active and inactive pins is presented to a cage with 27 sliding bars. Each bar has two sliding lugs on it, which can be placed either in a position where it is inactive, or in a position corresponding to any of the pinwheels, so that it will slide the bar to the left, if the pin currently presented by that pinwheel is active. The number of lugs sticking out rotates the cipher alphabet against the plaintext alphabet. The two alphabets used are just the regular alphabet, and the alphabet in reverse order, from Z back to A. This meant that encipherment was reciprocal, although the machine still had a switch to select encipherment or decipherment: this determined if the machine printed its output in five letter groups, or if it translated one letter, chosen by the user, to a space. The C-52, a postwar version of the Hagelin lug and pin machine, added an extra five sliding bars to the cage that, instead of moving the cipher alphabet, caused the stepping of the pinwheels to be irregular. The first pinwheel always moved, but the remaining five pinwheels only moved when their corresponding bars were slid to the left. The six pinwheels were labelled A, B, C, D, E, and F from left to right; bar 1 controlled pinwheel B, bar 2 pinwheel C, and so on. Also, on the C-52 the lugs could be moved from bar to bar, and the six pinwheels were chosen from a set with lengths 25, 26, 29, 31, 34, 37, 38, 41, 42, 43, 46, and 47. Using the pinwheels with lengths 34, 38, 42, 46, 25, and 26 allowed one to achieve compatibility with the C-36: provided one also turned off the irregular pinwheel stepping feature. The alphabet always started from its normal position, instead of the position last used, before being rotated by the projecting slide bars. This was perhaps the machine's main weakness, as it made attacks based on frequency counts of displacements possible, but it was perhaps unavoidable, since there was always a slight possibility of occasional mechanical errors. Particularly as the machines were often used on battlefields. (Book ID 20195) $1,750.00

Allan, Marquand. A New Logical Machine. Boston: American Academy of Arts and Science, 1886. 1st edition. Proceedings of the AAAS, Vol XIII, PArt II 8vo. Original printed wrappers. Good or better condition. We offer a binding copy of second half of the journal, pp 247-571. The Marquand contribution occupies pp 303-307 with one photographic plate of the apparatus. Wikipedia: Allan Marquand (1853-1924) was an art historian at Princeton University and a curator of the Princeton University Art Museum. After graduating from Princeton in 1874, Allan obtained his Ph.D. in Philosophy in 1880, at the Johns Hopkins University. His thesis, supervised by Charles Peirce, was on the logic of Philodemus. He returned to Princeton in 1881 to teach Latin and logic. During the 1881-82 academic year, Marquand built a mechanical logical machine that is still extant (picture at the Firestone Library); he was inspired by related efforts of William S. Jevons in the UK. In 1887, following a suggestion of Peirce's, he outlined a machine to do logic using electric circuits. This necessitated his development of Marquand diagrams. According to Lavin (1983: 8), the President of Princeton, McCosh, deemed "unorthodox and unCalvinistic" Marquand's relatively mathematical approach to the teaching logic, an approach he had learned at Peirce's feet. Hence in 1883, Marquand was offered a position teaching art history, a position he held until his death... +++See: "W. Stanley Jevons, Allan Marquand, and the Origins of Digital Computing" IEEE Annals of the History of Computing archive, Volume 21 , Issue 4 (October 1999)Pages: 21 - 27. (Book ID 22908) $750.00

Alt, Franz. A Bell Telephone Laboratories Computing Machine--I+II. Washington DC: National Research Council, 1948. 1st edition. Mathematical Tables and other Aids to Computation, III/21 Original printed wrappers. Very good condition. We offer the two issues of MTAC, with the complete article by Dr. Alt occupying pp 1-13 and 69-84. SCARCE. "Between 1937 and 1946 engineers and scientists at Bell Telephone Laboratories built a number of digital relay computers, among the first working programmable machines anywhere. Their experience with the technology of switching-that second aspect of telephony-was the basis for Bell's entry into digital computing. But the first aspect-the transmission of analog voice signals-played a role too, as we shall see. The invention of the computer at Bell Laboratories, like its invention elsewhere, resulted from a convergence of technical skill, social need, and talent. Those preconditions were there by the mid-1930's. It remained for one of Bell's employees, Dr. George Stibitz, to serve as the catalyst to bring them together." Reckoners, Bell Labs, page 0074 http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/Reckoners-ch-4.html ....+++On Franz Alt: Dr. Franz L. Alt (born 1910 in Vienna, Austria) is an Austrian born American mathematician who made major contributions to computer science in its early days. Franz Alt grew up in Austria and received a Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Vienna in 1932, researching set-theoretic topology and logical foundations of geometry. He left Austria for the United States after the 1938 Anschluss. An avid skier, he served in the U.S. Army's 10th Mountain Division during World War II reaching the rank of Second Lieutenant. After the war, he worked on the ENIAC and other Army computing projects; later he worked in the Computing Laboratory of the National Bureau of Standards, and eventually at the American Institute of Physics. He is best known as one of the founders of the Association for Computing Machinery, having served as its president from 1950 to 1952; he also wrote one of the first books on digital computers, Electronic Digital Computers (Academic Press, 1958). (Book ID 22907) $750.00

Babbage, Charles. Letter to Sir Humphrey Davy on the Application of Machinery to Calculate and Print Mathematical Tables. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Review, 1834. The Edinburgh Review, July, 1834, No. CXX. 8vo. Letter to Sir Humphrey Davy.on the application of Machinery to Calculate and Print Mathematical Tables by Charles Babbage WITH On the Application of Machinery to the Calculation of Astronomical and Mathematical Tables by Charles Babbage WITH Address to the Astronomical Society by Henry Thomas Colebrooke on presenting the first gold Medal of the Society to Charles Babbage Esq. For the invention of the Calculating Machine WITH On the determination of the General Term of a new Class of Infinite Series by Charles Babbage WITH On Errors common to many Tables of Logarithms by FULL TITLE: "Charles Babbage, WITH On a Method of Expressing by Signs the Action of Machinery by Charles Babbage, WITH Report by the Committee appointed by the Council of the Royal Society to consider the subject referred to in a Communication received by them from the Treasury, respecting Mr. Babbage"s Calculating Engine and to report thereupon" In the Edinburgh Review, July 1834, Volume LIX, no. 120, pp 263-327, illustrated. We offer the entire volume of 545pp. Bromley, "Table making and calculating engines," in "General introduction" to The Works of Charles Babbage, ed. Michael Campbell-Kelly (London: William Pickering, 1982), pp. 22-27. Origins of Cyberspace 51. (Book ID 22843) $1,000.00

Bardeen, J. Physical Principles Involved in Transistor Action. Lancaster, Pa: Physical Review, 1949. 1st edition. The Physical Review, Vol 75, Second Series, No. 8 8vo. Printed wrappers. Fine condition. This is the entire green-wrappered issue for April 15, 1949; work for which Bardeen shared the Nobel Prize for physics in 1972. Save for a little wear and a pinhole in the spine, this is a fine (+) copy--really a nice, bright copy of a significant and important paper by Bardeen and Brattain. ///*** The American Physical Society abstract for this article, from the APS website: The transistor in the form described herein consists of two point-contact electrodes, called emitter and collector, placed in close proximity on the upper face of a small block of germanium. The base electrode, the third element of the triode, is a large area, low resistance contact on the lower face. Each point contact has characteristics similar to those of the high back-voltage rectifier. When suitable d.c. bias potentials are applied, the device may be used to amplify a.c. signals. A signal introduced between the emitter and base appears in amplified form between collector and base. The emitter is biased in the positive direction, which is that of easy flow. A larger negative or reverse voltage is applied to the collector. Transistor action depends on the fact that electrons in semiconductors can carry current in two different ways: by excess or conduction electrons and by defect "electrons" or holes. The germanium used is n-type, i.e., the carriers are conduction electrons. Current from the emitter is composed in large part of holes, i.e., of carriers of opposite sign to those normally in excess in the body of the block. The holes are attracted by the field of the collector current, so that a large part of the emitter current, introduced at low impedance, flows into the collector circuit and through a high impedance load. There is a voltage gain and a power gain of an input signal. There may be current amplification as well. The influence of the emitter current, Ie, on collector current, Ic, is expressed in terms of a current multiplication factor, ÃŽÂ±, which gives the rate of change of Ic with respect to Ie at constant collector voltage. Values of ÃŽÂ± in typical units range from about 1 to 3. It is shown in a general way how ÃŽÂ± depends on bias voltages, frequency, temperature, and electrode spacing. There is an influence of collector current on emitter current in the nature of a positive feedback which under some operating conditions may lead to instability. The way the concentrations and mobilities of electrons and holes in germanium depend on impurities and on temperature is described briefly. The theory of germanium point contact rectifiers is discussed in terms of the Mott-Schottky theory. The barrier layer is such as to raise the levels of the filled band to a position close to the Fermi level at the surface, giving an inversion layer of p-type or defect conductivity. There is considerable evidence that the barrier layer is intrinsic and occurs at the free surface, independent of a metal contact. Potential probe tests on some surfaces indicate considerable surface conductivity which is attributed to the p-type layer. All surfaces tested show an excess conductivity in the vicinity of the point contact which increases with forward current and is attributed to a flow of holes into the body of the germanium, the space charge of the holes being compensated by electrons. It is shown why such a flow is to be expected for the type of barrier layer which exists in germanium, and that this flow accounts for the large currents observed in the forward direction. In the transistor, holes may flow from the emitter to the collector either in the surface layer or through the body of the germanium. Estimates are made of the field produced by the collector current, of the transit time for holes, of the space charge produced by holes flowing into the collector, and of the feedback resistance which gives the influence of collector current on emitter current. These calculations confirm the general picture given of transistor action. (Book ID 20757) $1,750.00

Bush, Vannevar. "As We May Think". New York: Atlantic Monthly, 1945. 1st edition. Original printed wrappers. Fine condition. Extremely Rare. (We have never seen the offprint of this paper, nor is it contained in the major collections of Computer History, nor is it contained in the Library of Congress Collections, nor in the National Union Catalog, nor in the World/Cat Database, nor in the collections of the Charles Babbage Institute, nor in Bush’s archives at M.I.T.. We have also contacted the editors at the Atlantic Monthly Magazine who have stated that they receive requests for copies of this article "all the time" and that it is their "most requested article for reprint", and that they have no knowledge of offprints having been done.) FINE copy. Bush Background: Bush did his undergraduate work at Tufts College, where he later taught. His master's thesis (1913) included the invention of the Profile Tracer, used in surveying work to measure distances over uneven ground. In 1919, he joined MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering, where he stayed for twenty-five years. In 1932, he was appointed vice-president and dean. At this time, Bush worked on optical and photocomposition devices, as well as a machine for rapid selection from banks of microfilm. Further positions followed: president of the Carnegie Institute in Washington, DC (1939); chair of National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (1939); director of Office of Scientific Research and Development. This last role was a presidential appointment which made him responsible for the 6,000 scientists involved in the war effort. During World War II, Bush worked on radar antenna profiles and the calculation of artillery firing tables. The mathematics involved was complicated and repetitive. Bush proposed the development of an analogue computer; this became the Rockefeller Differential Analyser. Unfortunately, his research was rendered obsolete by 1950 with the invention of the digital computer. It is ironic that one of the heroes of today's computer researchers was defeated in his own work by the predecessor of those selfsame computers. Vannevar Bush (1890-1974) is the pivotal figure in hypertext research. His conception of the Memex introduced, for the first time, the idea of an easily accessible, individually configurable storehouse of knowledge. Douglas Engelbart and Ted Nelson were directly inspired by his work, and, in particular, his ground-breaking article, "As We May Think." Bush is famous for his Memex, publicized in the aforementioned article in Atlantic Monthly (1945) and most readily available in Nyce and Kahn. Yet this same article also contained descriptions of devices rarely cited. These include the Cyclops Camera: "worn on forehead, it would photograph anything you see and want to record. Film would be developed at once by dry photography;" advances in microfilm; a thinking machine (actually a mathematical calculator); and a vocoder, "a machine which could type when talked to" (87). As Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, Dr. Vannevar Bush has coordinated the activities of some six thousand leading American scientists in the application of science to warfare. Some of the great internet developers who have recognized the importance of this paper by Bush include: Doug Englebart, would later write to Bush acknowledging the influence Bush's article had had on his own work. (Zachary, 267). J.C.R. Liklider "Computing's Johnny Appleseed," a well-deserved nickname for a man who planted the seeds of computing in the digital age, (Waldrop, 2000), Ted Nelson (Internet pioneer and coiner of the term “hypertext” and know as "one of the most influential contrarians in the history of the information age." (Edwards, 1997)) regards this effort by Bush as a foundation stone of the internet (Zachary, pg 399). References Bush, V. (1945) As We May Think. Atlantic Monthly.Available at: :http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/flashbks/computer/bushf.htm. Edwards, O. "Ted Nelson" . Forbes ASAP, August 25, 1997. Available at: http://www.forbes.com/asap/97/0825/134.ht Waldrop, M. "Computing's Johnny Appleseed." Technology Review, Jan/Feb 2000. Available at: http://www.techreview.com/articles/jan00/waldrop.htm . (Book ID 22796) $17,500.00

Bush, Vannevar. Thomas-Fermi Equatioon Solution by the Diferential Analyzer. American Physical Society, 1931. 1st edition. The Physical Review, Vol 38 (10), 15 November 1931 Original printed wrappers. Fine condition. Written with Samuel Caldwell, another great computer pioneer, this paper is the first to publish solutions achieved by the just-finished 100-ton computing device. The MIT machine was first reported on by Bush in the months preceding this publication in the Journal of the Franklin Institute. We offer this weekly issue of the Physical Review in the scarce original wrappers, where the Bush/Caldwell article appears on pp 1989-1903 (pp 1797-1913 comprising the issue). Scarce. (Book ID 23192) $850.00

Caldwell, Samuel. Analogue and Special Purpose Computing Machines.. 1949. 1st edition. 8vo. Very good condition. Mimeograph sheets, stapled, "full text of Paper Given before the ACM, Oak Ridge, Tenn, April 18-20, 1949". Dated 15 July 1949. 8vo, 10pp. "There is no question that MIT faculty members Vannevar Bush and Samuel Caldwell had been the principal originators of analog computing in the 1920s and 1930s. Yet McCartney's assessment misses the fact that, soon after the end of the Second World War, the MIT administration made the decision to return a Rockefeller Foundation grant that was to have paid for the recommencement of its analog computing program. MIT went on instead to back the digital work then starting up in the Servomechanisms Laboratory and in the Research Laboratory for Electronics-from Wm Asprey's review of "The Two Unknowns…the ENIAC" (Caldwell is pictured with Bush, standing at left) In a letter to Weaver in the early of 1946, professor Samuel Caldwell of MIT's Electrical Engineering department and head of MIT's Center of Analysis not only criticized von Neumann's lack of appreciation of the engineering problems in building digital computers but also indicated that MIT had the "key men required for the theoretical, developmental, and engineering aspects of the problem." [Samuel Caldwell, letter to W. Weaver, cited in Karl L. Wildes and Nilo A. Lindgren, A Century of Electrical Engineering and Compute Science at MIT, 1882-1982, Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1985, pp. 232-233.] In a letter to the staff of employees of Center of Analysis in early 1947, Caldwell wrote: "... in the field of electronic computation we entered the war among the leaders and emerged in a much less favorable position. ... resumption of our work in electronic computation development, at a greatly increased rate, stands as the largest and most important single item on our future development program."[Ibid., p.233.] (Book ID 22701) $1,250.00

HArtree, Douglas R.. Approximate Wave Functions and Atomic Field for Mercury.. American Physical Society, 1934. 1st edition. The Physical Review, 46(8), 15 OCtober 1934 Original printed wrappers. Fine condition. British physicist D.R. Hartree was the first to use an automatic calculator for problems in atomic theory. During the summer of 1933 he went to MIT and used Vannevar Bush's differential analyzer for the first stages of the computations for this article The work was a success, and on his return to England, he undertook with Arthur Porter the building of a model of the machine. We offer the entire weekly issue of the Physical Review in its original green wrappers, with the Hartree article occupying pp 738-743 (the issue being pp633-746). SCARCE. According to the DSB: "Hartree's chief contribution to science was his development of powerful methods of numerical mathematical analysis, which made it possible for him to apply successfully the so-called self-consistent field method to the calculation of atomic wave functions of polyelectronic atoms, that is, those which in the neutral condition have more than one electron surrounding the nucleus. These calculations involved the numerical solution of the partial differential equations of quantum mechanics for many-body systems subject to the usual boundary conditions. From the atomic wave functions it is possible to calculate the average distribution of negative electric charge as a function of distance from the nucleus. (Book ID 23193) $650.00

Lardner, Dionysius. Babbage's Calculating Engine. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Review, 1834. 1st edition. Edinburgh Review, volume 59, #120, July 1834. Pp 263-327 (of 545pp). 8vo. Half-calf. Fair condition. This is a binding copy--the text is fine, though the binding is really quite gone. Dionysius Lardner ("the world's first science journalist [Hyman, "Charles Babbage--Pioneer of the Computer", p. 120 (1982)]) and reported here, for the first time, on the Babbage calculating engine. "This highly favorable review...was the first popular exposition in the subject...Lardner arguing for the necessity of such a machine...the conclusion of the article is the history of the construction of the machine. with suggestions for reaching a rapid and successful conclusion to the project". "It was from this article that Scheutz...derived the first conception of constructing a small machine for effecting the same purpose as that of Babbage". Archibald, R.C. "P.G. Scheutz...Biography and Bibliography", MTAC II, no. 17, p 239, January 1947. "The machine that Lardner described...fascinated Scheutz, who (with eventual success) set out to design one for himself". Trevor WIlliams, "A History of Computing Technology", p. 175 (1985). Note on Condition: this is a binding copy of the entire volume of the Edinburgh Review for this half year--this means that the spine is pretty well shot although the covers are recoverable--the text however is crisp and bright (Book ID 22802) $650.00

Mandelbrot, Benoit. How Long is the Coastline of Britain? Statistical Self Similarity and Fractional Dimension.... Science, 1967. 1st edition. Science, vol 156, no. 3775, pp 636-638 Pp 636-638 8vo. Original printed wrappers. Fine condition. **RARE ORIGINAL OFFPRINT** How Long Is the Coast of Britain? Statistical Self-Similarity and Fractional Dimension is a paper by mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, first published in Science in 1967. In this paper Mandelbrot discusses self-similar curves that have fractional dimensions between 1 and 2. These curves are examples of fractals, although Mandelbrot does not use this term in the paper, as he did not coin it until 1975. In the first part of the paper Mandelbrot discusses research published by Lewis Fry Richardson on how the measured lengths of coastlines and other natural geographic borders are dependent on the scale of measurement. Richardson had observed that the measured length L(G) of various country borders was a function of the measurement scale G. Collecting data from several different examples, he conjectured that L(G) could be closely approximated by a function of the form L(G) = MG1 − D Mandelbrot interprets this result as showing that coastlines and other geographic borders can have a property of statistical self-similarity, with the exponent D measuring the Hausdorff dimension of the border. With this interpretation, the examples in Richardson's research have dimensions ranging from 1.02 for the coastline of South Africa to 1.25 for the West coast of Britain. In the second part of the paper Mandelbrot describes various curves, related to the Koch snowflake, which are defined in such a way that they are strictly self-similar. Mandelbrot shows how to calculate the Hausdorff dimension of each of these curves, each of which has a dimension between 1 and 2. He also mentions (but does not give a construction for) the space-filling Peano curve, which has a dimension of 2. The paper is important because it shows Mandelbrot's early thinking on fractals, and is an example of the linking of mathematical objects with natural forms that was a theme of much of his later work. Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Long_Is_the_Coast_of_Britain%3F_Statistical_Self-Similarity_and_Fractional_Dimension" (Book ID 22815) $2,000.00

Metropolis, Nicolas. The Monte Carlo Method. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 1949. Volume 44, Number 247, September 1949 Numerical methods that are known as Monte Carlo methods can be loosely described as statistical simulation methods, where statistical simulation is defined in quite general terms to be any method that utilizes sequences of random numbers to perform the simulation. Monte Carlo methods have been used for centuries, but only in the past several decades has the technique gained the status of a full-fledged numerical method capable of addressing the most complex applications. The name ``Monte Carlo'' was coined by Metropolis (inspired by Ulam's interest in poker) during the Manhattan Project of World War II, because of the similarity of statistical simulation to games of chance, and because the capital of Monaco was a center for gambling and similar pursuits. Monte Carlo is now used routinely in many diverse fields, from the simulation of complex physical phenomena such as radiation transport in the earth's atmosphere and the simulation of the esoteric subnuclear processes in high energy physics experiments, to the mundane, such as the simulation of a Bingo game. See: Eckhardt, Roger (1987). Stan Ulam, John von Neumann, and the Monte Carlo method, Los Alamos Science, Special Issue (15), 131-137. Metropolis, Nicholas and Stanislaw Ulam (1949). The Monte Carlo method, Journal of the American Statistical Association, 44 (247), 335-341. Another account: Credit for inventing the Monte Carlo method often goes to Stanislaw Ulam, a Polish born mathematician who worked for John von Neumann on the United States’ Manhattan Project during World War II. Ulam is primarily known for designing the hydrogen bomb with Edward Teller in 1951. He invented the Monte Carlo method in 1946 while pondering the probabilities of winning a card game of solitaire. Quoted in Eckhardt (1987), Ulam describes the incident as: The first thoughts and attempts I made to practice [the Monte Carlo Method] were suggested by a question which occurred to me in 1946 as I was convalescing from an illness and playing solitaires. The question was what are the chances that a Canfield solitaire laid out with 52 cards will come out successfully? After spending a lot of time trying to estimate them by pure combinatorial calculations, I wondered whether a more practical method than “abstract thinking” might not be to lay it out say one hundred times and simply observe and count the number of successful plays. This was already possible to envisage with the beginning of the new era of fast computers, and I immediately thought of problems of neutron diffusion and other questions of mathematical physics, and more generally how to change processes described by certain differential equations into an equivalent form interpretable as a succession of random operations. Later … [in 1946, I] described the idea to John von Neumann, and we began to plan actual calculations. And another: Short History of Monte Carlo Simulation The name "Monte Carlo" appeared in the World War II times, and sometimes is attributed to the researcher Nicholas Metropolis, inspired in the interest of Stanislaw Ulam, his colleague of Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, in the poker game. Monte Carlo, the capital of Monaco, was a known reference for gambling. According Eckhardt, Ulam invented the Monte Carlo method in 1946 while pondering the probabilities of winning a card game of solitaire. However, Metropolis "attributes the germ of this statistical method to Enrico Fermi, who had used such ideas some 15 years earlier”.. According Liu (2001, p.vii-viii): "The basic idea underlying the method was first brought up by Ulam and deliberated between him and von Neumann in a car when they drove together from Los Alamos to Lamy. Allegedly, Nick Metropolis coined the name 'Monte Carlo', which played an essential role in popularizing the method". Liu comments that the Los Alamos scientists aiming to take advante of the first "super" computer MANIAC, invented a statistical sampling-based technique to solve problems related to stochastic neutron diffusion in atomic bomb project and for estimating eigenvalues of the Schrödinger equation. Winston (1996, p.22) wrote that the term was coined by mathematicians S. Ulam and J. von Neumann in the feasibility project of atomic bomb by simulations of nuclear fission, and they given the code name Monte Carlo for these simulations. The first Monte Carlo paper, "The Monte Carlo Method" by Metropolis & Ulam, was published in 1949 in the Journal of the American Statistical Association. Since then, several different areas has been using the Monte Carlo simulations. With the advent of personal computers and the popularization of faster computational machines, the Monte Carlo simulations has been increasing popular as an important alternative for the solution of complex problems. Shewhart, Walter Andrew. Statistical Method from the Viewpoint of Quality Control. With the editorial Assistance of W. Edwards Deming. Washington, DC, Department of Agriculture: 1939. First edition. 8vo, 1x,155pp, diagrams, tables etc in the text. Original cloth. A fine (+) copy. Very bright. $1250 Fine copy of a scarce and seminal work. "Whereas Shewhart's early writings and first book (1931) were focused on statistical control of industrial production processes, in his second book (above) he extended the applications of statistical process control to the measurement processes of science, and stressed the importance of operational definitions of basic quantities in science, industry and commerce….(this book) has profoundly influenced statistical methods of research in the behavioral, biological and physical sciences, and in engineering…" (DSB, XVIII, 818a) (Book ID 21322) $4,000.00

Rapoport, Anatol. Contribution to the Probabilistic THeory of Neural Nets: I-4, (complete). Chicago: University of Chicago, 1950. Bulletin of MAthematical Biophysics, vol 12, June, Sept and Decem Original printed wrappers. Very good condition. We offer three issues of Nicolas Rashevsky's Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics containing the three parts of Rapoport's groundbreaking contribution. The issue for June lacks the outer wrappers; the other two issues are complete with their outer wrappers. June: (1) Randomization of refractory Periods and Stimulus in Intervals, pp 109-121. September: (2) Facilitation and Threshold Phenomena, pp187-198. December, (3): Specific Inhibitions, pp 317-327. AND (4) Various Models for Inhibition, (same issue), pp 327-338. (Book ID 23176) $750.00

Shockley, WIlliam. Holes and Electrons. New York: American Institute of Physics, 1950. 1st edition. Physics Today, vol 3 number 10 Pp 16-25 Royal 8vo. Original printed wrappers. Fine condition. This is the original wrappers edition of Physics Today (Vol 3 Number 10, October 1950) PRECEDING PUBLICATION of Shockley's book "Electrons and Holes in Semiconductors, with Applications to Transistor Electronics". The paper "presents in simplified form a portion of the author's book...which is planned for publication..." The Shockley article occupies pp 16-25 of this 40pp publication. From the library of David Katcher, founding editor of "Physics Today". This is a fine, crisp copy of this publication--a nicer copy would be hard to imagine. (Book ID 22740) $950.00

Simon, Herbert. A Comparison of Game Theory and Learning Theory.. Pittsburg: Carnegie Institute of Technology, 1956. 1st edition. (1956). 11x8.5", mimeographed typed sheets, staple-bound. Owner's stamp on top front wrapper upper right. Fine copy. Rare. HERBERT A. SIMON's research has ranged from computer science to psychology, administration, and economics, and philosophy. The thread of continuity through all his work has been his interest in human decision-making and problem-solving processes, and the implications of these processes for social institutions. For more than 40 years, he has been making extensive use of the computer as a tool for both simulating human thinking and augmenting it with artificial intelligence. Born in 1916 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Simon was educated in political science at the University of Chicago (B.A., 1936, Ph.D., 1943). He has held research and faculty positions at the University of California (Berkeley), Illinois Institute of Technology, and since 1949, Carnegie Mellon University, where he is Richard King Mellon University Professor of Computer Science and Psychology, and a member also of the Departments of Philosophy and of Social and Decision Sciences, and the Graduate School of Industrial Administration. In 1978, he received the Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, and in 1986 the National Medal of Science; in 1969, the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association, in 1975 the A.M. Turing Award of the Association for Computing Machinery (with Allen Newell), in 1988, the John von Neumann Theory Prize of ORSA/TIMS, and in 1995, the Research Excellence Award of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Simon's books include Administrative Behavior, Human Problem Solving, jointly with Allen Newell, The Sciences of the Artificial, Scientific Discovery, with Pat Langley, Gary Bradshaw, and Jan Zytkow, three volumes of his collected economics papers (Models of Bounded Rationality), two volumes of collected psychology papers (Models of Thought), a volume of papers on philosophy of science (Models of Discovery), and his autobiography, Models of My Life. (Book ID 21325) $2,750.00

Thomson, WIlliam. On a Machine for the Solution of Simultaenous Linear Equations. London: Nature Magazine, 1878. 1st edition. Nature, volume 19 ` Royal 8vo. Very good condition. Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) along with his brother James devised this early analogue computation device appearing in the December 19, 1878 issue of the great science journal "Nature", occupying pp 161-162, the article being approximately 1000-words. We offer the issue, complete, with the original front wrapper and ads, removed from a larger bound volume. ALso in this issue appears an interesting book review (of 3-pages) by James Clerk Maxwell, an article on the microphone by Thomas Tait (Thomson & Tait!), as well as a number of other interesting entries. The whole issue comprises 25pp. AN article of the same title appears in the Proceedings of the Royal Society in 1879. James Thomson's article "On an Integrating Machine Having a New Kinemtic Principle" appears a year earlier, 1876, in he same journal. (Book ID 22687) $475.00

von Neumann, John. Automata Studies. Pirnceton: Princeton University Press, 1956. 1st edition. Annals of MAthematical Studies 34 285pp Royal 8vo. Original printed wrappers. Very good condition. COntains papers by Ashby, Culbertson, Davis, Kleene, de Leeuw, Minsky, Shannon, Uttley and von Neumann. "A collection of important papers on the foundation of theoretical computer science by some of the most prominent pioneers of the field, e.g., Shannon's construction of a universal Turing machine with only two states." (Lynge & Sohn) Hook & Norman: Origins of Cyberspace, No. 893. This is quite a nice copy, thought there is a bit of removal at the spine bottom from a home-made spine label. Difficult book to find in its first printing. (Book ID 23118) $500.00

Wiener, Norbert. Extrapolation, Interpolation, and Smoothing of Stationary Time Series. With Engineering Applications. Cambridge: MIT, 1949. 1st edition. Cloth, dustjackets. Very good condition. Very good dust jacket SIGNED BY WIENER IN FULL Black cloth, stamped in red and gilt. Signed by Wiener, in full. Scarce in dust jacket. First edition of the first book on the Wiener Filter, which marks the beginning of communication theory. It has been the opinion of many that Wiener will be remembered for his Extrapolation long after Cybernetics is forgotten. Indeed few computer-science students would know today what cybernetics is all about, while every communication student knows what Wiener's filter is. The work was circulated as a classified memorandum in 1942, as it was connected with sensitive war-time efforts to improve radar communication. This book by Wiener became "the basis for modern communication theory" (D.S.B.). Combining ideas from statistics and time-series analysis, Wiener used Gauss's method of shaping the characteristic of a detector to allow for the maximal recognition of signals in the presence of noise. This method came to be known as the "Wiener filter." (Book ID 20196) $850.00