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I am looking for a (hopefully eventually comprehensive) list of examples of books or works that are:

  • written by an originator of a field of mathematics, and about that field
  • written by a pioneer of a field of mathematics, who introduced important ideas or concepts, and about those ideas or concepts

There are many reasons motivating this - the short form is that often it is a good idea to read the thoughts of the originator of a field to understand their motivations or how they arrived at the ideas.

I don't want to exclude substantial reading material that isn't specifically a book, so here are some rough rules. I am looking for books, papers, manuscripts, lecture notes, or correspondences over 50 pages, or collections of those over 50 pages in total (eg 5 papers of 5 pages each + manuscript of 25 pages). I chose 50 as it's a comfortable number to say that a collection has the contents of a thin book. Additionally video or audio recordings of over 5 hours are admissible, where each hour counts for 10 pages in the above calculation. Other forms of writing are allowed too, in case I forgot something.

I am not looking for substantially shorter works or collections of those. Anything under 40 pages is strictly unsuitable for this list.

Here are some examples:

  • Euclid's Elements
  • Fermat's collected works
  • Grothendieck's EGA and SGA
  • Isaac Newton - Principia Mathematica
  • Briefwechsel Cantor-Dedekind, by E. Noether and J. Cavaillès, Paris, Hermann & Co, 1937
  • (Physics) Ernst Mach - Mechanics
  • (Chemistry) Linus Pauling - Introduction to Chemistry

Please could you include the following. Not all of those are strictly required, but they will help others:

  • the author
  • what their contribution was to the field
  • name of work (in the language that's on the work and if you can in English)
  • a rough description of whether the work (book/paper/etc) talks about the claimed contribution
  • rough amount of reading pages (or hours if audio/video)
  • where it was printed
  • the year of printing,
  • a place to obtain a copy, like a modern re-print, translation from Latin, Greek, or Arabic, etc.

If you so desire and it is allowed by Math Overflow, please include an image of the title page or of a page that touches on the important topic of the book in a very poignant way. Da Vinci's drawing of a screw helicopter would be an example here.

Here are some relevant, but not quite similar, questions:

cheater
  • 165
  • I think this question is too broad for MO. It's more suitable for a personal blog or some kind of collaborative wiki like the OEIS and not for a Q&A site like MO. – Timothy Chow May 14 '22 at 17:48
  • What does Pauling and Da Vinci have to do with a "field of mathematics"? – Somos May 15 '22 at 00:00
  • @Somos Pauling has nothing to do with mathematics, hence the book was prefixed as being in the field of Chemistry. Da Vinci contributed to mechanics (which you may or may not see as mathematics) and geometry. – cheater May 15 '22 at 01:24
  • @TimothyChow if you look at the links I provided to questions in similar vein, you will see that they have been fruitfully contributed to. This sort of question is why the "big-list" tag exists in the first place. – cheater May 15 '22 at 01:25
  • @cheater I think that the difference is that you mentioned the word "comprehensive" in your question. MO isn't the right venue for a comprehensive list of the type you're asking for. If you set up some other site for a comprehensive list, and then ask on MO for some suggestions for titles that you may have missed, then you might get a better reception. – Timothy Chow May 15 '22 at 01:49
  • \bib{MR1303779}{book}{ author={Connes, Alain}, title={Noncommutative geometry}, publisher={Academic Press, Inc., San Diego, CA}, date={1994}, pages={xiv+661}, isbn={0-12-185860-X}, review={\MR{1303779}}, } – Sebastien Palcoux May 15 '22 at 02:39
  • @TimothyChow that's not an important part of the question. – cheater May 15 '22 at 11:08
  • @TimothyChow the post got closed for not being focused. To me that means it's asking for multiple things. Can you mention two things that this post is asking for? The only thing I'm asking for is works by specific authors, I don't know what else you see it asking for? – cheater May 15 '22 at 11:15
  • @cheater It's asking for works in geometry, works in algebra, works in analysis, works in logic, works in topology, works in number theory...that's six things already. Every area of mathematics and every author in mathematics is potentially up for grabs. That's what is meant by being too broad and not focused. I have already suggested how you could modify your question in a way that might get a better reception. – Timothy Chow May 15 '22 at 12:56
  • @TimothyChow out of the links at the bottom of the post, links 2, 3, 6, 7 ask about works without limiting to a specific narrow area of mathematics, and they have not been closed, and have become useful resources for mathematicians. Even without this, I don't believe asking about works in mathematics in general is somehow "unfocused". I believe it's a much too personal opinion to belong in a moderation process. Even then, people using comments to answer this question proves that it's useful for mathematicians and users of MO. – cheater May 16 '22 at 09:19
  • @cheater It seems you're focused on trying to win an argument with me. I'm not a moderator. I'm just trying to help you accomplish your goal, and explaining how you might go about doing that. I'm happy to let you win any argument you wish to make, but I don't think that winning an argument with me will help you achieve your aims. – Timothy Chow May 16 '22 at 13:16
  • @TimothyChow you may not be a moderator but you voted to close the question, which is incorrect based on what I presented. – cheater May 17 '22 at 21:00

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