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Alonzo Church's Notes on Logic, 1936

(Church,  Alonzo.)  Mathemaitcal Logic, Lectures by Alonzo Church, Princeton University, October 1935-January 1936.  Princeton:  1936.  1st edition.  124 leaves  4to.  Original printed wrappers.  This is the Library of Congress' copy, with the original mimeographed LC callcard laid in.  This is a solid, decent copy, almost Very Good, though not without its pictured blemishes.  SOLD

These lecture notes of Church's class were taken by six of his graduate students (Ficken, Landau, Ruja, Singleton, Steenrod, Sweer, Weyl) in the fall term of 1935 at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton.

The following is an interview between William Aspray and Albert Tucker on the publication of this work, taken from the Princeton University website on the Princeton mathematics community in the 1930's. Needless to say, Church was an enormous influence, changing the entire face of mathematical logic. (It should be noted to that A.M. Turing came to study with Church at Princeton and particualry in this course in the fall of 1935.)

"Tucker: Notes were taken, often by an assistant to the professor. He was given the job of taking notes of the lectures, writing them up, and having them edited by the professor. Then these would be mimeographed, and the people in the course could for, say, a dollar or two subscribe to the notes, which would be turned out in batches a week or two at a time. At the end, if someone wanted to, the accumulated notes could be brought in, and we could send them somewhere to have them bound. I think there was a charge of 25 cents for binding. I have a whole drawer full of these notes. This is the way in which they were bound, and these were lectures by Alonzo Church. Now these notes [showing a set of notes] were taken cooperatively by, these are all graduate students.

The First Polish Mathematical Conference, Lwow, 1927

Ksiega Pamiatkowa Pierwszego Polskiego Zjazdu MAtematycznego, Lwow, 7-10 Ix. 1927. ("Commemorative Book of the First Polish Mathematical Conference, Lwow, September 7-10, 1927".) Published and printed in Krakow, 1929.  Octavo, 216pp.  Bound in cloth in the 1950's.  Very nice copy of a scarce publication.  12 copies located in the OCLC:  Berkeley, LC, US Naval Observatory, MIT, University of Missouri, Princeton, Brown; overseas copies include Cambridge, NUKAT UNION CATALOG OF POLISH LIBR, BIBLIOTHEEK UNIVERSITEIT VAN AMSTERDAM, UNIV OF BASEL UNIVERSITATSBIBLIOTHEK, UNIVERSITAT LEIPZIG.  $250

Longer papers included in this publication are by Henryk Greniewski, Alfred Tarski "Les fondements de la geometrie des corps" pp 29-33), Zygmunt Zawirski, Waclaw Sierpinski, Bronislaw Knaster, Stefan Straszewicz, A.F. Andersen, Stefan Kempisty, Stanislaw Mazur, J.von Neumann (one page on Zur Theorie des Masses),  Wladyslaw Nikliborc, F. Leja, P. Sergescu, Stanislaw Garlicki, Ludomir Wolfke, ANtoni Lomnicki, Otton Nikodym, Szymon Ohrenstein, and a host of others contributing one- or two-page papers/abstracts.

 

First Slavic Mathematical Congress, Warsaw, 1929

Sprawozdanie z I kongresu matematykow krajow slowiankich//Comptes Rendus du I Congres des Mathematiciens des Pays Slaves, Warszawa, 1929, edited by F. Leja.  Printed in Warsaw, 1930.  Octavo, 394pp.  Bound in the 1950's in a very sturdy, meant-to-be-used cloth.  Very good copy, quite nice. Six copies are found in the OCLC, none of which are in the United States or the United Kingdom:  Staats u. Universitatsbibliothek (Hamburg), ULB Sachsen Anhalt, Institute of Social History (the Netherlands), Nukat Union Catalog the the Polish Library, and Hebrew University.  $300

This Congress was in essence a "coming out" occasion for the Warsaw School of Logic--as reported  in the chapter on the "Warsaw School of Logic, 1981-1939" in Mostowski and Foundational Studies (2008) Karl Menger noted that the Polish logicians "had been somewhat isolated" (page 40) up until this time, and that the meeting did much for introducing their work to the international scene.

There are 58 papers presented in this volume (most I'd say are in French, followed by German, Polish, Russian and English), the authors being: Bydzovsky, Chwistek, Dickstein, Dusl, Fréchet, Golab, Hadamard, Hârlen, Hoborski, Hosiasson, Hostinsky, Jarnik, Kaczmarz, Karamata, Kawaguchi, Kempisty, Knaster, Kolodziejczyk, Koutsky, Kuratowski, Leja, Lubelski, Mazurkiewicz, Menger, Milicer-Gruzewska, Neyman, Nikodym, Obreschkoff, Petr, Petrovitch, Peyovitch, Popoff, Popova, Presburger, Rychlik, Saltykow, Sergescu, Sierpinski, Sieczka, Slebodzinski, Steinhaus, Szpilrajn, Tschakaloff, Vitali, Wazewski.  

 

Whitehead's Universal Algebra

Whitehead,  Alfred North. 

A Treatise on Universal Algebra with Applications.   Cambridge University Press,  1898.  1st edition.  xxvi, 586pp. Bound in the original publisher's  cloth.  Very good copy with a bit of wear to spine top and bottom--a very nice copy of an important book. (I've seen other copies of this book over time, and I believe that this is an above-average copy; perhaps the binding didn't do the somewhat oversized-book justice, especially if it was used.  This is Volume 1 and the only volume completed. From here Whitehead joined forces with Russell (after both realized that their individual research in this area was very closely associated) and produced the Principa Mathematica.  $1250.00

Hilbert's First Attempt at Establishing the Consistency of Arithmetic

ITEM:  Hilbert, David.  "On the Foundations of Logic and Arithmetic."  In The Monist, July 1905, vol XV, No 3, pp 338-352 (in the entire issue of pp 321-478). Offered removed from a larger bound yearly volume of the journal, with evidence of that on the spine.  Offered with the original printed wrappers.  Ex-library, from the Bureau of American Ethnology. First translation in English frm the original delivery in 1904.  Good copy.  $125

The paper appears in From Frege to Goedel:  a Source Book in Mathematical Logic, 1879-1931, by Jean Van Heijenoort. 

 

Gonseth and the Foundations of Mathematics

ITEM:  Gonseth,Ferdinand.  Les Fondements des Mathematiques, de la Geometrie d'Euclide, a la Relativite generale et a l'Intuitionisme.  Paris; Librarie Scientifique Albert Blanchard, 1926.  First edition.  243pp.  Good copy in original wrappers with a little fraying at top of spine.  $75

Table des matières: Notions fondamentales de géométrie. Axiomatique de l'espace euclidien. Le continu. De la compatibilité et de l'indépendance des axiomes d'un système. La construction des continus. Les géométries non-euclidiennes. La théorie de l'expérience. Le temps et la relativité. La notion du mouvement et la relativité générale.

Gonseth's Geometry

ITEM:  Ferdinand Gonseth.  La Geometrie et le Probleme de l'Espace.  Published by Editions du Griffon, Neuchatel, (with a paper label laid over, "Dunod"). Pairs:  1945-1952.   Five volumes from the Bibliotheque Scientifique Series II, La Science Dialectique. ALl bound in the original wrappers.  FIne condition(s).  $300

Includes in the five parts:   (1) la Doctrine Prealable, 1-67; (2) Les Trois Aspects de la Geometrie,  69-156; (3) L'Edification Axiomatique,  pp 157-264; (4) La Synthese Dialectique, 265-341; (5) Les Geometries Non Euclidiennes, 351-453

Rules of the Edinburgh Mathematical Society

ITEM:  Rules of the Edinburgh Mathematical Society, published ca. 1900.  5x3 inches, folded sheet, 3pp.  Curious little publication detailing the simple rules of the society. Nice condition.  $45

From Wiki: "The Society was founded in 1883 by a group of Edinburgh schoolteachers and academics, on the initiative of A. Y. Fraser and A. J. G. Barclay, teachers at George Watson's College and Cargill Gilston Knott, who was the assistant of Peter Guthrie Tait, the professor of physics at the University of Edinburgh. The first president was J.S. Mackay, the head mathematics master at the Edinburgh Academy."

von Neumann's Continuous Geometry, 1936

von Neumann,  John:  Continuous Geometry;  Princeton:  Institute for Advanced Study,  1936.  1st printing.    72  4to.  Cloth-backed stiff wrappers.  First edition.  Very good condition.    This version of Continuous Geometry is made from the notes taken by Dr. L. Roy Wilcox and printed via the mimeograph process, then stapled and bound in a cloth tape format. Scarce.  There would be an expanded version of this work published in 1938, and another, again, in 1960.   $825.00

Kiesewetter on Pythagoras

"We shall therefore borrow all our Rules for the Finishing our Proportions, from the Musicians, who are the greatest Masters of this Sort of Numbers, and from those Things wherein Nature shows herself most excellent and compleat." Leon Battista Alberti (1407-1472)

Kiesewetter, Rafael Georg.  Ueber die Octave des Pyhtagoras.  Ist die Mitte einer gespanniten Saite wirklich der Punkt der Octave  ihres Grundklanges und die pythagoraeische Ration 1:2 eine Wahrhet?  Wien, 1848.  18pp. 9x6 inches.  Scarce.  $125

Kiesewetter was also the owner of a Stradivari violin, which I'm thinking is unusual in the history of mathematics.

See here for Harvard's digital copy of this book. Kiesewetter is seen as the founder of musicology in Austria, who also published the substantial works Die Verdienst der Niederländer um die Tonkunst, 1829, Der Europäische Geschichte - oder unserer heutigen Musik abendländischen, 1834, and the "groundbreaking (H. von Helmholtz)Die Musik der Araber, 1842.