The Arithmetic of Infinitesimals: John Wallis, 1656 (Sources and Studies in the History of Mathematics and Physical Sciences)
by: Wallis John;/Stedall Jacqueline A. (I

Hardcover. NY, Springer, 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, glossy yellow boards, 192 pages. John Wallis (1616-1703) was the most influential English mathematician prior to Newton. He published his most famous work, Arithmetica Infinitorum, in Latin in 1656. This book studied the quadrature of curves and systematized the analysis of Descartes and Cavelieri. Upon publication, this text immediately became the standard book on the subject and was frequently referred to by subsequent writers. This will be the first English translation of this text ever to be published. To the modern reader, the Arithmetica Infinitorum reveals much that is of historical and mathematical interest, not least the mid seventeenth-century tension between classical geometry on the one hand, and arithmetic and algebra on the other. Newton was to take up Wallis's work and transform it into mathematics that has become part of the mainstream, but in Wallis's text we see what we think of as modern mathematics still struggling to emerge. It is this sense of watching new and significant ideas force their way slowly and sometimes painfully into existence that makes the Arithmetica Infinitorum such a relevant text even now for students and historians of mathematics alike. Name on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.