Search Results: Authors starting with V from Atticus Rare Books

Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1936. 1st Edition. Full volume. FIRST EDITION OF VALTAT'S DESCRIPTION OF HIS PATENTED CALCULATING MACHINE FOUNDED ON THE CONVERSION OF DECIMAL INPUT INTO BINARY INPUT PRIOR TO CALCULATION. Valtat here notes "that binary digits could be represented either mechanically or electrically. He also stated that in an electric circuit the switch "on" would equal 1 and the switch "off" would equal 0" (Jeremy Norman, History of Science). As noted below, some instead credit Louis Couffignal who in 1936 and in this same volume, wrote of employing binary notation in a calculating machine. Couffignal "argues the utility of representing numbers by binary notation in computers and discusses the design of electrical calculators" (Aiken, Proposed Automatic Calculating Machines, 10). A Frenchman, Raymond Valtat (1898-1986) patented his calculator in 1932, but this 1936 paper is his first written account of his invention. In this paper, Valtat finally explains his thought and methodology,… Read More

London, 1911. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION OF VAN DEN BROEK'S HYPOTHESIS THAT "THE NUCLEAR CHARGE OF A PARTICULAR ELEMENT IS DETERMINED BY ITS PLACE IN THE PERIODIC TABLE, ITS ATOMIC NUMBER, NOT ITS ATOMIC WEIGHT" (Kumar, Quantum, 88). Just one month after Rutherford put forth his model of the atom showing the presence of a small charged nucleus in an atom, van den Broek, van den Broek published this brief letter in Nature suggesting the true, physical meaning of ‘atomic number.' "Van den Broek began by drawing attention to the fact that two lines of experimental research, namely, Rutherford's and Barkla's, supported the view that the charge on an atom is approximately half its atomic weight, or to repeat an equation that appeared just above, Z = A/2. This evidence had provided support for his speculation of 1907 that atomic weight increases by approximately two units between each two consecutive elements. He then referred to his new periodic table and his prediction that 120 elements exist… Read More

London: Taylor and Francis, 1926. 1st Edition. Full volume FIRST EDITION OF THE VAN DER POL EQUATION - THE FIRST PRESENTATION OF OSCILLATIONS THAT ARE NOT NEARLY LINEAR. In this paper, van der Pol, a Dutch physicist, develops differential equations of coupled electrical systems that describe self-oscillating triode circuits. He presents "relaxation oscillations" in which energy is fed into small oscillations and removed from large oscillations. This work distinguishes relaxation oscillations from harmonic ones, first presents the term ‘relaxation oscillations, and derives the first mathematical model of a relaxation oscillator. The van der Pol equation is only an example among many others, but "its role is far more important in. Van der Pol's breakthrough was to propose a dimensionless equation which can thus be used to explain various systems regardless their origins [an equation for the multivibrator based on current and potential departures from the unstable equilibrium values]. From that… Read More

Lancaster: American Physical Society, 1954. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION IN ORIGINAL WRAPS OF VAN HOVE'S PAPER PRESENTING A CENTRAL QUANTITY IN THE STUDY OF FLUCTUATIONS, THE DENSITY-DENSITY SPACETIME CORRELATION THAT HAS COME TO BE KNOWN AS THE VAN HOVE FUNCTION. Here Van Hove offers "a natural time-dependent generalization for the well-known pair distribution function g(r) of systems of interacting particles. The pair distribution in space and time thus defined, denoted by G(r,t), gives rise to a very simple and entirely general expression for the angular and energy distribution of [the] Born approximation scattering by the system" (Van Hove). Van Hove's paper is considered seminal. Another way of stating this is to say that the Van Hove formula proveides the relation between the cross-sections "for scattiner of slow neutrons by an assembly of nuclei and space-time correlation functions for hte motion of the scattering system... [His papers shows that] the Born approximation scattering cross section… Read More

Paris, 1933. 1st Edition. Folio-sized with particularly handsome original paper wraps. November 1933 issue of a La Presse Médicale, a French medical journal is known for its graphic beauty, inside and out. Continuously paginated pp. 1793-1875. Minor surface scuffing. Very good condition.

Paris: Chez Fuchs et Guillaume, 1798. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION OF TWO PAPERS BY VAUQUELIN REPORTING THE DISCOVERY OF BERYLIUM. Louis Nicolas Vauquelin (16 May 1763 - 14 November 1829), was a French pharmacist and chemist who reports in this paper his discovery of a new ‘earth' obtained by pulverizing gemstone emerald before melting with three times its mass of potassium hydroxide" (Walsh, Beryllium Chemistry, 7). In beryl (beryllium aluminum silicate) he found an earth (oxide) that superficially resembled alumina (aluminum oxide) but was insoluble in alkali and did not form alum. At the suggestion of the editors of Annales de Chimie, Vauquelin named it glucina, from the sweetness of its sulfate, but when first isolated in 1828 by Friedrich Wohler and, independently Antoine Bussy, it was renamed beryllium (DSB Vol. 13, p. 597). Though both Beryl and emerald were known as early as 77 A. D., they were not thought to be identical in any way. In 1797 the French mineralogist René Just Haüy… Read More

London: Williams and Norgate, 1880. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION OF THE JOINT FIRST PUBLICATION OF VENN DIAGRAMS (see below for clarification of concurrent publication). Venn diagrams provide an easy and better way of visualizing elements, information, sets, concepts, logical relationships, and even simply ideas. Essentially, they are illustrations that utilize circles (which can be overlapping or non-overlapping) in order to depict a relationship between finite groups of things such as mathematical or logical sets. Venn diagrams became an important part of the 1960s new math movement based on set theory and are still widely used today. John Venn was a British philosopher and cleric in the Anglican Church. Unusually, when he was ready announce his discovery, he did so by publishing two separate papers in two separate journals — each appearing in the July issues of their respective journals. 'On the diagrammatic and mechanical representation of propositions and reasonings' in the Philosophical… Read More

New York: AAAS, 2001. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION, JOURNAL ISSUE IN ORIGINAL PRINTED WRAPS OF THE 1st PUBLICATION & ANNOUNCEMENT OF THE 1st COMPLETE GENOME SEQUENCE OF A LIVING SPECIES, inclusive of Venter's poster of the genome sequence itself. The genome sequence of Haemophilus influenzae used a newly developed technique of whole-genome shotgun sequencing was 1.8 million base pairs in length and required 4 months of sequencing to produce. The entire issue is dedicated to the announcement of the sequencing of the human genome. Until March 2000, rival teams of scientists who had been working independently to map the complete sequence pooled their data: American-born biochemist-geneticist J. Craig Venter and his colleagues at Celera Genomics and, working with a public consortium (under the direction of the NIH, known as the Human Genome Project (HGP), geneticist Francis Sellers. Together, an amalgam of public and private researchers was able to successfully map and sequence the human genome. This… Read More

London: Macmillan, 1963. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION (FULL VOLUME) OF THE PAPER IN WHICH VINE & MATTHEWS, WITHOUT REFERRING TO IT AS SUCH, SHOW PROOF OF THE OCCURRENCE OF CONTINENTAL DRIFT. Their work is considered "the first scientific test of sea floor spreading, and a crucial development in the theory of Plate Tectonics" (Wikipedia; Geological Society Web Portal: "Pioneers of Plate Tectonics"). "Although Vine and Matthews were not the first to suggest that the sea floor was spreading, their paper was the first to reconcile an unpopular theory with direct palaeomagnetic evidence from seafloor lava flows. In less than a decade, the idea of continental drift was accepted, and earth science was born as a modern interdisciplinary subject" (Nature Website Portal). The geologist Harry Hess had proposed that new oceanic crust forms as the result of rising molten rock. Working together at Cambridge, the British geologists Frederick Vine and Drummond Matthews believed that if Hess was correct, the… Read More

FIRST EDITION OF THE PAPER IN WHICH Von ARDEEN REPORTS ON & DETAILS HIS CONSTRUCTION OF THE "THE FIRST SCANNING ELECTRON MICROSCOPE," (SEM) an invention he had earlier conceived (Collard, The Development of Microbiology, p. 25). In this paper, Von Ardeene "realized in prototype form" the microscope he had earlier theorized (Brown, Pais, and Pippard, Twentieth Century Physics, III, pp. 1588). He "was awarded the Leibniz Medal for the invention of the scanning electron microscope" (Scanning Transmission Electron Microscopy, Aberration-Corrected Imaging in Transmission Electron Microscopy, 2015). Manfred von Ardenne was a self-educated German physicist and inventor. In the late 1930s, he realized there was great potential in employing a focused electron probe rather than a wide beam. In other words, von Ardenne wanted to use a focused electron probe to scan across specimens. Toward that end, von Ardenne (in an earlier paper) suggested the development of a Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) which… Read More

Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1876. 1st Edition. In 1876 and working independently of Maxwell, Vyshnegradsky "developed stability criteria of steam engine governors" (Engineering Department University of Illinois). His work explained "the conditions of stability [and criteria] of a steam engine equipped with a direct-action centrifugal regulator" (DSB, XIV, 105-106). As well, Vyshnegradsky's work continues to be studied in the fields of cybernetics and information theory (more on this below). Vyshnegradsky's "most significant scientific contributions were in the theory of automatic regulation. Before him, many scholars had studied the regulation of industrial processes, but the regulators that they developed were created experimentally and were not explained on a theoretical basis. Through his research Vyshnegradsky established the mathematical bases for the general scientific principles of automatic regulation. Prior to his work, the machine and the regulator had been examined individually, and only… Read More