FOURIER, Jean Baptiste Joseph Théorie analytique de la chaleur. Paris, Firmin Didot, 1822
4to (255 x 202 mm), pp [iv] xxii 639, with two engraved plates; some very slight occasional spotting, a very good copy in near-contemporary green half morocco and marbled boards. £12,500
First edition of the first mathematical analysis of heat diffusion. This work makes 'extensive application of mathematics to physical problems. The work becomes a key source in later research on the theory of functions and on the foundations of calculus' (Parkinson, Breakthroughs).
'Fourier's achievement is better understood if we see it as twofold: treating first the formulation of the physical problem as boundary-value problems in linear partial differential equations, which ... achieved the extension of rational mechanics to fields outside those defined in Newton's Principia; and second, the powerful mathematical tools he invented for the solution of the equations, which yielded a long series of descendants and raised problems in mathematical analysis that motivated much of the leading work in that field for the rest of the century and beyond' (DSB).
Provenance: William Herrick Macaulay (1853-1936), with bookplate recording the book's bequest to King's College, Cambridge, in the year of his death; Macaulay was a Cambridge mathematician and author of Newton's theory of kinetics (1897) and The laws of thermodynamics (1913).
Dibner 154; En français dans le texte 232; Norman 824; Parkinson p 273
£12500
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