LEIBNIZ, Gottfried Wilhelm, ‘Nouvelle arithmetique binaire’ [with:] ‘Explication de l’arithmétique binaire, qui se sert des seuls caracteres 0 & 1’, in Histoire de l’Academie des Sciences, avec les Mémoires, Année MDCCIII (Jean Boudot, Paris), 1705

172 x 120mm; pp. 58–63 (Histoire), pp. 85–89 (Memoires) [whole volume offered]

The language of modern computing. Here Leibniz proposes and explores a base-2 numeral system, first introducing the concept and then discussing the nature of binary arithmetic, and its relation to the ancient Chinese divination text the I Ching (易經), or ‘Book of Changes’.

Binary notation had been mentioned before Leibniz, but only as part of an inquiry into different base systems. Leibniz was the first to explore the binary system and to explain its arithmetic, and is rightly considered the inventor of the form of arithmetic that lies behind all modern computing (for more on this see the Introduction to Lloyd Strickland and Harry Lewis, Leibniz on Binary: The Invention of Computer Arithmetic [MIT Press, 2022]).

Although Leibniz’s first work on binary dates from the late 1690s, this 1705 edition of the Histoire and Mémoires of the Academie des Sciences is the first public presentation of this pathbreaking work.

Good condition: neatly rebacked, with new endpapers.