Historical Book and Manuscript Collection

July 17, 2006. The Clay Mathematics Institute, in cooperation with its partners at Libraries Without Walls and the contributing libraries, announces a program to make digital facsimiles of significant historical mathematical books and manuscripts freely available.

The initial collection consists of the oldest extant manuscript and printed editions of Euclid's Elements, in Greek (888 AD) and Latin (1482 AD), respectively. Other work will be added in the coming year. Look also for enhancements to the viewer softare.

Euclid's Elements, Constantinople, 888 AD (Greek). MS at the Bodleian Library

High resolution copies of the manuscript are available for study at the Bodleian Library, Oxford University and at the Clay Mathematics Institute, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Full online editions are available at CMI, Libraries Without Walls and at rarebookroom.org. More ....

Euclid's Elements, first printed edition, 1482 AD (Latin)

The first printed edition of Euclid's Elements, Elementarum Euclidis, appeared in Venice in 1482 through the work of Aldus Manutius, see rarebookroom.org. It will also be posted on Libraries without Walls.

Riemann's 1859 Manuscript

The manuscript in which Riemann formulated his famous conjecture about the the zeroes of the zeta function.

Felix Klein Protokolle

The "Klein Protokolle," comprising 8600 pages in twenty-nine volumes, record the activity of Felix Klein's seminar in Goettingen for the years 1872-1912.

This image on the left is from Volume I, page 113, the seminar "Ueber die Gruppe der Modulargleichung fuer Transformation pter Ordnung und specielle ueber die Transformation 25ter de elliptischer functionone." Seminar of Sunday, February 14, 1880.

Digitization of the Klein Protokolle was carried out by Libraries without Walls under the direction of Chet Grycz with photography by Ardon bar Hama. Our thanks to Yuri Tschinkel at the Mathematische Institut in Goettingen for making this project possible.

See Libraries Without Walls for the complete collection of the Klein Protokolle.


Contents

Euclid, Constantinople, 888 AD

Euclid, Venice, 1482 AD

Riemann, Goettingen, 1859

Felix Klein, Goettingen, 1872-1912

Credits


Our thanks to Libraries Without Walls for developing the software to browse the manuscripts and to the Internet Archive for conversion of the digital images into the proper form. Special thanks to Chet Grycz for his work both at Octavo.com and at the Internet Archive in bringing this project to fruition. Special thanks also to the each of the libraries who made these manuscripts available. Their forward looking view of what a library is and should be is what makes this digitization effort possible.