EUCLID. Niccolo TARTAGLIA translator Solo Introduttore delle scientie mathematice... con une ampla espositione dello istesso tradottore di nuono aggiunta... Venice, Curtio Troiano, 1565
4to (206 x 144 mm), ff 315 [recte 311] [1], with woodcut printer's device on title and verso of last leaf, numerous woodcut diagrams in text; two pages with a few scattered ink spots, a few gatherings lightly browned, a fine, crisp copy in seventeenth-century Italian vellum. £2250
Second edition (first 1543) of the first vernacular Euclid, translated by Niccolo Tartaglia with his own commentary. It is in this version by Tartaglia, with his extensive commentary, that most of the major Italian scientists, engineers, and architects of the sixteenth century learned in detail Euclidian geometry and its applications. The work is especially interesting for Tartaglia's appreciation of the application of mathematical and geometrical analysis to problems of mechanics. Published the same year as Copernicus' De revolutionibus, this work had much more immediate impact on the progress of the sciences, and provided the mathematical tools which were later used to establish the Copernican world view.
'Tartaglia's Italian translation of Euclid - the first published translation of the Elements into any living language of Europe - was an event of great importance to the progress of mechanics, and indeed of all applied sciences. For the first time the principal treasure of rigorous mathematical reasoning was opened to men who knew neither Greek nor Latin. The implications of that event for the science of mechanics were great because literacy in Italy was very high, especially among engineers and artisans' (Stillman Drake and I.E. Drabkin in Mechanics in sixteenth-century Italy).
See Stillman Drake, Galileo at Work pp. 2-4 et seq. for a discussion of the importance of Tartaglia's Euclid and its influence on Galileo.
This edition contains Tartaglia's translation of the Opusculum de Levi & Ponderoso, which appears here for the first time. 'As Duhem observed, it is the most precise exposition that we possess of the Aristotelian dynamics of freely moving bodies' (DSB).
Adams E994; Thomas-Stanford 39; NUC: DLC DAU RPB MB MH MiU; OCLC adds Dartmouth, University of Oklahoma, UCLA, CalTech, Smithsonian, and Illinois Institute of Technology
£2250
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