An early English treatise on logarithms [manuscript].
1620
Items
Details
Title
An early English treatise on logarithms [manuscript].
Created/published
1620s-1670s.
Description
1 volume
Note
This is a PRELIMINARY RECORD. It may contain incorrect information. Please email catalog@folger.edu for assistance
Genre/form
Manuscripts (documents)
Place of creation/publication
Great Britain.
Item Details
Call number
V.a.702
Folger-specific note
From dealer's description: "Manuscript notebook, in English containing an untitled treatise on logarithms (“...Logarithmes are numbers which being joined to proportionalls do keepe equall differences...”), thirty chapters, in a single neat hand with a few careful corrections (including two slips pasted down with revised text), the fnal chapter (“Of ordinate Isoperimetrall Figures”) incomplete, 68 pages, with additional notes on logarithms and other mathematical subjects, problems and calculations, tables for calculating measures, weights, and fnancial sums, astrological calculations, and also, written from the reverse, the introduction of another treatise on logarithms, incomplete, 4 pages, the great bulk of the mathematical content probably 1620s-1630s with later entries to the later 17th century (one dated 1676), in various hands, altogether c. 100 pages, plus blanks. 'The invention of the Logarithmes is wholly given unto John Napper Baron of Marchiston in Scotland... Mr. Edward Wright that famous mathematician translated them into English... Mr. Henry Briggs and Mr. Edmund Gunter went into Scotland to conferr with the worthy inventor... How to refne them into an easier method... & published divers severall additions...and the logarithms for sinds tangents secants which Invention all Artists may truly honor them for ever, but every man cannot write all but posterity will fnd more use then the Inventors can see at frst...' PROVENANCE “Richard Farmby”, possible early ownership inscription; Bloomsbury Auctions, 20 November 1997, lot 423, £850, Erwin Tomash." Ordered from Sotheby's - London, D 9234, 2018-09-18, The Erwin Tomash Library on the History of Computing: Part 1: 1180-1813 Mubashir Ibn Ahmad al-Razi to Babbage (Sale L18409), lot 375. Purchase made possible by The Eric and Mary Weinmann Acquisitions Fund.
Folger accession
270334