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A ROYAL PRESENTATION BINDING. First edition of this superb collection of thirty-one treatises by the leading scientists of seventeenth-century France, almost all of which are published here for the first time. This is one of the earliest important publications of the Académie des Sciences, and one of the most magnificent, and the present copy was probably intended for presentation: it is bound in contemporary calf with the arms of Louis XIV on each cover. Founded on 22 December 1666, one of the principal functions of the Académie was to facilitate publication of the works of its members. Frenicle and Roberval were founding members (as was Huygens), and without the assistance of the Académie it is likely that many of their works would have remained unpublished (only two works by Frenicle and two by Roberval were published in their lifetimes). After the death of Frenicle and Roberval in 1675, their books and manuscripts were entrusted to the astronomer Jean Picard; eight treatises by Huygens were also sent to Picard for publication in this collection. After Picard s death in 1682, publication of the works was brought to fruition by Philippe de la Hire. La Hire also included in the Divers ouvrages five treatises by Picard himself, including an unusual 37-page work on dioptrics, one by Mariotte and two each by Auzout and Rømer. The most important work in the volume is probably Roberval s Traité des indivisibles, composed around the same time as Cavalieri's Geometria indivisibilibus (1635) but independent of it and published here for the first time. The treatises by Frenicle, a close correspondent of Fermat, treat topics in number theory and related fields. See below for a full list of contents. Gilles Personne de Roberval (1602-75) arrived in Paris in 1628 and put himself in contact with the Mersenne circle. "Mersenne, especially, always held Roberval in the highest esteem. In 1632 Roberval became professor of philosophy at the Collège de Maître Gervais. On 24 June 1634, he was proclaimed the winner in the triennial competition for, the Ramus chair (a position that he kept for the rest of his life) at the Collège Royal in Paris, where at the end of 1655 he also succeeded to Gassendi s chair of mathematics. In 1666 Roberval was one of the charter members of the Académie des Sciences in Paris … He himself published only two works: Traité de méchanique (1636) and Aristarchi Samii de mundi systemate (1644). A rather full collection of his treatises and letters was published in the Divers ouvrages de mathématique et de physique par messieurs de I Académie royale des sciences (1693), but since few of his other writings were published in the following period, Roberval was for long eclipsed by Fermat, Pascal, and, above all, by Descartes, his irreconcilable adversary. "Roberval was one of the leading proponents of the geometry of infinitesimals, which he claimed to have taken directly from Archimedes, without having known the work of Cavalieri. Moreover, in supposing that the constituent elements of a figure possess the same dimensions as the figure itself, Roberval came closer to the integral calculus than did Cavalieri, although Roberval s reasoning in this matter was not free from imprecision. The numerous results that he obtained in this area are collected in the Divers ouvrages, under the title of Traité des indivisibles. One of the first important findings was, in modern terms, the definite integration of the rational power, which he most probably completed around 1636, although by what manner we are not certain. The other important result was the integration of the sine … the most famous of his works in this domain concerns the cycloid. Roberval introduced the "compagne" ("partner") of the original cycloidal curve and appears to have succeeded, before the end of 1636, in the quadrature of the latter and in the cubature of the solid that it generates in turning around its base … "On account of his method of the "composition of Movem. Seller Inventory # 4565
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