APOLLONIUS of Perga

Opera, per doctissimum philosophum Ioannem Baptistam Memum patritium Venetum, mathematicharumque artium in urbe Veneta lectorem publicum. De Graeco in Latinum traducta, & noviter impressa.

      [Colophon:] Venice, Bernardinus Bindonus, 1537 Folio, ff 88 [1], without the final blank, title printed in red and black with woodcut portrait of a mathematician, and within elaborate woodcut border incorporating 22 portraits of scientists and philosophers, numerous diagrams in the text, and woodcut of Saint Peter at the end; abrasion to small, blank area of title, propositions xxxviii and xxxix on leaf g1 verso and proposition xxi on g6 recto misimposed and printed upside down (see below), the latter part of the work with short wormtrack to upper outer corners, a few upper outer corners stained and with old repairs; otherwise a very clean and crisp copy in nineteenth-century calf-backed marbled boards, spine gilt, red leather label. £22,500 First edition of Apolloniusís Conics (books I-IV; books V-VII werenít printed until 1661), one of the three greatest works, along with those of Euclid and Archimedes, of classical mathematics. This first edition is very rare and has escaped the notice of Dibner, Horblit, and Noman who only list the 1566 Commandino edition. ëApollonius (c. 245-190 BC) was the last of the great Greek mathematicians, whose treatise on conic sections represents the final flowering of Greek mathematicsí (Hutchinsonís Dictionary of Scientific Biography p 16). This edition is the first printing of any work by Apollonius, preceding by 29 years the Commandino edition of 1566, also of the first four books. These were the only books to survive in the original Greek; books V-VII survived in Arabic versions only (book VIII is lost), and were translated and published in 1661 at the instigation of Borelli. Apollonius synthesised the work of his predecessors and developed new methods and techniques for studying conics. ëFor a modern reader, the Conics is among the most difficult mathematical works of antiquity. Both form and content are far from tractable. The authorís rigorous rhetorical exposition is wearing for those used to modern symbolism... Apollonius has, in a way, suffered from his own success: his treatise became canonical and eliminated its predecessors, so that we cannot judge by direct comparison its superiority to them in mathematical rigor, consistency, and generality. But the work amply repays closer study; and the attention paid to it by some of the most eminent mathematicians of the seventeenth century (one need mention only Fermat, Newton, and Halley) reinforces the verdict of Apolloniusí contemporaries, who, according to Geminus, in admiration for his Conics gave him the title of The Great Geometer... ëThe first real impulse towards advances in mathematics given by the study of the works of Apollonius occurred in Europe in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries... It is hard to underestimate the effect of Apollonius on the brilliant French mathematicians of the seventeenth century, Descartes, Mersenne, Fermat, and even Desargues and Pascal, despite their very different approach. Newtonís notorious predilection for the study of conics, using Apollonian methods, was not a chance personal taste... It was not until Ponceletís work in the early nineteenth century... revived the study of projective geometry that the relevance of much of Apolloniusí work to some basic modern theory was realized...í ëHipparchus and Ptolemy absorbed his work and improved on it. The result, the Ptolemaic system, is one of the most impressive monuments of ancient science (and certainly the longest-lived), and Apolloniusí work contributed some of its essential partsí (DSB). The text was passed down by Eutocius, a Byzantine mathematician of the Justinian period. Books V-VII, which only survived in an Arabic version, were discovered by Borelli, and first printed, in Latin, in 1661. Book VIII is lost. This work was translated from the Greek, possibly using a manuscript belonging to the dedicatee Cardinal Marino Grimani, by Giovanni Battista Memmo (1466-1536), a Venetian patrician and the first professor of mathematics of the Venetian State. The misimpositions of g1 verso and g6 recto are probably due to the sheet having been incorrectly seen through the press, rather than the sign of an early issue. Riccardi I, 147 (ëraro libroí); Stillwell 139; Sander 480; see DSB I pp 179-193; see Dibner 101, Horblit 4, and Norman 57 for the Commandino edition; not in Adams; OCLC: Yale, Harvard, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, MIT, and Louisville