Mathematics Article

"If I were again beginning my studies, I would follow the advice of Plato
and start with mathematics." -Galileo

Without mathematics, there would be no science. Harvard mathematician Benjamin Pierce once said that mathematics was "the science that draws necessary conclusions." And so it is.

Indivisible from science, mathematics has a place in the library of every science collector. Without mathematics, there would be no E=mc², no probability of inheriting genes, no way to measure the atomic weight of an element on a periodic table. Mathematics is the foundation on which all science rests and the proof by which most theories are shown to be viable.

Certainly, any collector contemplating mathematics must consider a copy of Euclid's Elements. The oldest mathematical textbook in the world, nearly perfect when it was written in 5th-century Greece, it was the source of all of the Western world's earliest mathematical knowledge. The exceptionally rare first edition in Latin was not published until 1482 and the sought after and desirable first edition in English was not published until 1570. With a complete translation of Euclid, Europe finally had the basis to expand its scientific research into new fields.

When the Rivault-edited Archimedes of 1615 was published, science could grow even more. Archimedes laid the building blocks for calculus. It was this edition, with its hundreds of in-text mathematical models, that Descartes, Fermat, and Newton all owned and read. Newton, of course, would go on to establish mathematical physics, the branch of science that leads straight to scientists like Einstein.

While the 18th century after Newton and the 19th century were filled with progress in calculus and geometry, the 20th century was, by comparison, an explosion. Einstein's entry onto the scene melded physics and mathematics like never before. The clamor for technology, particularly as a result of war and the Cold War, meant that science now had to work. Theories such as relativity were forced out of the classroom and into the laboratory. Mathematics was used at every step, to create bombs, spaceships, televisions, and other technologies people had never dreamed of in other eras.

The new breed of mathematicians and scientists such as Nash and von Neumann used mathematics in new ways, in new fields, with new technologies, opening up new areas of inquiry. Science had become entirely indistinguishable from math, impossible to separate from it.

For the science collector, the question is not, "Why collect mathematics?" but rather "What complete collection could exclude it?"