STEVIN Simon Les oeuvres Mathématiques de Simon Stevin de Bruges. Ou sont insérées les Mémoires mathématiques… Le tout reveu et corrigée & augmenté par Albert Girard.

DSB, XIII, 47-51 ; Roberts & Trent, pp. 303-304.

The best edition of the scientific writings of Stevin (1548-1620), the most influential of all mathematicians produced by the Low Countries in the 16th century.

The present edition has become very scarce on the market; it contains his writings on algebra and arithmetic (first part) followed by cosmography (including geography, and astronomy), applied geometry, statics optics, fortification (including mathematics applied to military science), and navigation (second part).

“While mathematicians up to his time had followed the Greek example and given each proof by reductio ad absurdum, Stevin introduced methods that, although still cumbersome, paved the way toward simpler methods of the calculus” (DSB).

In this book, Stevin sets out the rules of single and compound interest and gives tables for the rapid computation of discounts and annuities; introduces decimal fractions for general purposes; gives a general treatment of the arithmetic and algebra of his time; provides his important works on mechanics and hydrostatics; presents one of the first descriptions of the Copernican system; and outlines his important theories of fortification and field encampment.

“The first systematic treatise on hydrostatics since Archimedes” (DSB).

This edition also contains Stevin’s translation, the first into a modern language, of the work of Diophantus.

This edition by Albert Girard (1595-1632), a famous mathematician from Lorraine, was published posthumously by his widow, as she explains in her preface: ” Here is a poor widow with eleven orphaned children, whose husband and father, who died a year ago, left them only a good reputation for having served faithfully and devoted all his time to researching the most beautiful secrets of mathematics; He was delighted when he planned to leave some useful monuments to posterity, of his own invention, which he himself would have brought to the feet of your Most Illustrious Lords, if God had given him the leisure to complete them.”
According to the Belgian mathematician Henri Bosmans, Girard’s discoveries are the most important ones made between Viète and Descartes. His work, which bridges the traditions of Coss, the innovations of François Viète’s specious algebra, and the concerns that animated Pierre de Fermat and Bachet de Méziriac at the same time, touches on a variety of fields and brings considerable innovations. His mathematical writing, inherited from the Coss and partly from the new algebra, is teeming with new notations.

Several of Girard’s proposals are milestones in the history of mathematics. Among these are the first notations for the sine function (sin), dating back to 1626. He was one of the first to formulate the fundamental theorem of algebra in the case of real polynomials (1629) and the four-square theorem. He is the author of the first known statement of the two squares theorem, known as ‘Fermat’s Christmas present’ (1625), and one of the first statements of the Girard-Waring formula, a precise definition of Fibonacci sequences, etc. The formula, which he was the first to publish and partially prove, giving the area of a spherical triangle using its angles, is called Girard’s or Harriot-Girard’s theorem.

This copy is complete with the movable parts mounted on pages 529 and 532, which are sometimes found on a separate sheet or are most often missing. Page 623 has been folded by the bookbinder, and the text and illustration on the fortification are entirely present and have not been touched by the bookbinder’s knife.

Some quires toned, otherwise a very good, complete copy.