University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Rare Book Room Exhibit

This is the first edition of Clairaut's first publication, a treatise on tortuous curves, with six folding engraved plates, written when he was only sixteen. The Académie des Sciences was so impressed by this mathematical prodigy that it suspended its rules of admission to elect him to the Académie at the age of eighteen. Much of Clairaut's later research was on the effect of gravity and centrifugal force on rotating bodies, going beyond Isaac Newton whose monumental Principia he assisted in translating.

Purchased through the generosity of the University of Illinois Library at Urbana-Champaign.

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