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THE EARLIEST OF THE SIX KNOWN AUTHOR'S PRESENTATION COPIES. First edition, first issue, and a superlative copy, presented by Newton to his close friend and collaborator Nicolas Fatio de Duillier, with an inscription recording the gift in Fatio's hand and with his ink and pencil annotations in the text. This is the earliest of the six known presentation copies of the Opticks, none of which is inscribed in Newton's hand - the presentation inscription in this copy is dated five days earlier than that in the copy Newton presented to the Royal Society, of which he was then President. Only one other author's presentation copy of Opticks has sold at auction, that copy presented to Edmond Halley (lot 918, Robert S. Pirie sale, Sotheby's New York, December 4, 2015, $1,330,000). Of Newton's three greatest contributions to science - his theory of gravity, his theories of light and colour, and the invention of calculus - the first was published for the first time in the Principia (1687), and the other two in the present work. "Newton's Opticks did for light what his Principia had done for gravitation, namely, placed it on a scientific basis" (Babson, p. 66)."One of the supreme productions of the human mind" (Andrade), the Opticks "summarized Newton's discoveries and theories concerning light and color: the spectrum of the sunlight, the degrees of refraction associated with different colors, the color circle (the first in the history of color theory), the invention of the reflecting telescope, the first workable theory of the rainbow, and experiments on what would later be called 'interference effects' in conjunction with Newton's rings. His discovery of periodicity in Newton's rings . led Newton to postulate that periodicity was a fundamental property either of light waves or of waves associated with light. Nevertheless, Newton preferred the corpuscular theory of light, with which he is usually associated, because of its explanatory value for certain optical phenomena and because it allowed him to link the action of gross bodies with the action of light" (Norman). "All previous philosophers and mathematicians had been sure that white light is pure and simple, regarding colors as modifications or qualifications of the white. Newton showed that the opposite is true . Natural white light, far from being simple, is a compound of many pure elementary colors which can be separated and recombined at will" (PMM). "Newton's Opticks dominated the science of optics for over a century . the experimental approach adopted in the Opticks was lauded and widely followed in optical science and served as a model for other experimental sciences" (Shapiro, p. 166). The two appended tracts, Tractatus de quadratura curvarum and Enumeratio linearum tertii ordinis, are the first of Newton's purely mathematical works to be published. De quadratura is Newton's first publication of his method of fluxions, or calculus, which he developed in terms of 'prime and ultimate ratios', an early version of the theory of limits; it includes the first published statement of the general binomial theorem and of 'Taylor's theorem' on series expansions. Fatio de Duillier, the recipient of this copy of the Opticks, was an accomplished mathematician in his own right. After working in the Netherlands, where he befriended Christiaan Huygens, he came to England in 1687, became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1688, and made the acquaintance of Newton. Fatio became the leading intermediary between Newton and Huygens; the exchanges between these two great scientists did much to shape and modify Newton's theories on optics and other matters. In the 1690s, as Newton's closest confidant, Fatio became the most likely person to oversee a revised edition of the Principia, discussing corrections with Newton and exchanging letters. Fatio championed Newton against his Continental rivals in his Lineae brevissimi descensus investigatio geometrica duplex (1699), the work that ignited the priority dis. Seller Inventory # 5080
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