Dr. Bernard Bolzano's Paradoxien des Unendlichen herausgegeben aus dem schriftlichen Nachlasse des Verfassers (Wissenschaftliche Classiker in Facsimile-Drucken. Band II.) [with] Impossibilite du Nombre Actuellement Infini. La Science Dans ses Rapports av…

xii, 134, 44, xiv, 62 pp. German and French text. Pebbled cloth spine and corners, marbled paper over boards. 1889 second edition, a facsimile of the 1851 original, which is the first work on infinite numbers and set theory. "Bolzano recognized the necessity, in analyzing the paradoxes of infinity, of defining various 'obvious' mathematical concepts, including that of continuity... Certain of the mathematical implications of [his] simple and obvious statement about continuity are utterly astonishing" (J.R. Newman, The World of Mathematics, p. 2411). Bolzano anticipates certain basic ideas of set theory, developed a generation later by Georg Cantor, who fully acknowledged his indebtedness to Bolzano. Bound together with Cauchy's work on physics and mathematics. Cauchy was foundational to complex analysis and the study of permutation groups in abstract algebra, and the first to formally prove theorems of calculus.