Springfield [Massachusetts]: G. and C. Merriam, 1833. Title page continues: "his travels in America and residence in Europe; his return to this country and the causes which led him to his present profession; with his peculiar methods of calculation." 12mo, original publisher's glazed brown cloth, printed paper spine label. pp [2], (viii), (9)-204, [2] + frontispiece. Spine label is a little darkened with a bit of wear and loss of a few letters; small chip and neat repair lower spine; narrow chips and neat repair along front joint; VG otherwise, internally clean, tight, unworn, fine. Autobiography by this child prodigy and "mental calculator" who for a brief period was a sensation on two continents. "Colburn's abilities developed rapidly and he was soon able to solve such problems as the number of seconds in 2,000 years, the product of 12,225 and 1,223, or the square root of 1,449. When he was seven years old he took six seconds to give the numbers of hours in thirty-eight years, two months, and seven days. Zerah is reported to have been able to solve fairly complex problems. For example, the sixth Fermat number...The question is whether this number, 4,294,967,297, is prime or not. Zerah calculated in his head that it was not and has a divisor of 641. The other divisor is 6,700,417 and can easily be found using a calculator." -Wikipedia. He lost his powers with the onset of adulthood. After nine years of service as an itinerant Methodist preacher, eventually ended up a professor of languages at Dartmouth College. Colburn died of TB at age 34. Bell "Men of Mathematics" pp. 342-3: Sabin 14257.

London: J. Johnson, 1811. Octavo, pp (iii)-(xvi), 507, (3, ads). Original boards, page edges untrimmed. Lacking the half-title leaf. Spine lacking, recent rice paper spine and recent spine label. Front inner hinge repaired with old cloth tape and recent archival paper tape; evidence of removed labels from endpapers front and rear; ink ownership name Thomas Smith, Trinity College, Cambridge, April, 1822. Boards have damp stains, edge wear, corners rounded from wear. Text has occasional foxing but clean and unworn, now tight in the binding. Peter Barlow, F.R.S., 1776-1862, self-educated, was a mathematics master at the Royal Military Academy 1801-47. In 1814 he published NEW MATHEMATICAL TABLES, which became known as Barlow's Tables. They gave the squares, cubes, square roots, cube roots, and reciprocals of all integer numbers from 1 to 10,000. These tables were regularly reprinted until 1965 when computers rendered them obsolete. He helped develope the Barlow lens which in a modified form is still in use today in astronomy. He won the Royal Society's Copley Medal for his work correcting the deviation of ship's compasses caused by iron in the hulls and invented an early electric motor." Perhaps the British mathematican of this period who showed the greatest genius, or at any rate the greatest perseverance, was Peter Barlow. Born of humble parents, he became one of the leading writers of England on the theory of numbers.. " - Smith, History. of Mathematics, I, 460. Barlow's first book.

Clarendon Press (Oxford University Press), 1967. Second printing, corrected (first was in 1964). Green cloth. (xii), 328 pp. Ink name and address to upper inner corner of front pastedown; spine very lightly sunned, light spots to rear cover; light soiling to page edges; else a VG tight & unworn jacketless copy, no marks in text. The book contains chapters on matrix algebra elimination methods of Gauss, Jordan, and Aitken, compact elimination methods of Doolittle, Crout, Banachiewicz and Cholesky, orthogonalization methods, condition, accuracy and precision, comparison of methods, measure of work, iterative and gradient methods, iterative methods for latent roots and vectors, and notes on error analysis for latent roots and vectors. Fox, Professor of Numerical Analysis at Oxford, was also Directory of their computing laboratory. Though this undergraduate text contains little directly about computers or computer languages, it has computer relevance and the author advises that teachers of ALGOL can wisely use the algorithms in the text as excercises. The Leslie Fox Prize for Numerical Analysis of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (IMA) is a biennial prize established in 1985 by the IMA in honour of mathematician Leslie Fox (1918-1992).

Johann Ritter: Reading [Pennsylvania], 1807. Contemporary marbled boards and plain leather spine. [x], 176, [2] pp. Spine has chips to tips; inner hinges neatly repaired with rice paper; boards rubbed; text has yellowing, moderate foxing, occasional minor soiling, and a damp stain to lower portion from pp 155 to end including rear endpapers; text VG otherwise. This is quite possibly the first mathematics text book originally published in the United States by a German-American. A search through The First Century of German Language Printing in the United States of America turned up nothing earlier, though there were some earlier ready reckoners. There was a 1786 text by Ludwig Höcker, but it was probably an American printing of a work published in Germany earlier before he immigrated. Karpinski, Bibliography of Mathematical Works Printed in America Through 1850, p. 170.

New York: Wiley, c1989. Third printing. pp 237, index. Fine in fine jacket. 'Uniting the essential topics in one source, this introduction to Bayesian statistics is the first broadly based compendium of its theory and practice. It traces the roots of Bayesian statistics from the period before Bayes up to the present, covering many Bayesian computer programs. Discusses topics from the most fundamental principles to actual applications and case studies. Featuring the original essay by Bayes -- reproduced in its entirety with a complete biographical sketch -- it demonstrates how the concept has evolved over the years via numerous illustrations, such as the results of an experiment at the Rand Corporation that assessed the probability of nuclear war in the 1980s, and the results of a Bayesian analysis of papers of disputed authorship.''