an unpublished letter from henry oldenburg to johann heinrich rahn

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Letter from Henry Oldenburg to Johann Heinrich Rahn 261
Given the existence of a copy of Oldenburg’s letter in a collection of Rahn’s correspondence,
Rahn’s comment on it here must be viewed with considerable suspicion. It is
of course conceivable that Oldenburg’s letter was not delivered until four years after it
was sent; but the scenario is an unlikely one. And the fact that Rahn so vaguely misrepresented
the date of Oldenburg’s attempted communication with him (‘more than two
years ago’) seems consistent with a deliberate tactic of obfuscation; had he genuinely
been informed of the existence of an undelivered letter, and genuinely instituted a search
for it, there would seem to be no reason why he should not have remembered the dates
of those occurrences with reasonable accuracy. Whether any further attempt was now
made at an exchange of letters between Oldenburg and Rahn is not known, but it also
appears unlikely: Johann Heinrich Rahn died in 1676, and Henry Oldenburg died in the
following year.
NOTES
1 H. Oldenburg, The Correspondence (ed. A. R. Hall and M. B. Hall), 13 vols (Madison, WI,
University of Wisconsin Press and London, Mansel; Taylor & Francis, 1965–86). [hereafter: OC].
2 Zentralbibliothek, Zurich, MS S. 353, fos. 137–138. The permission of the Zentralbibliothek to
publish the text of this letter is very gratefully acknowledged.
3 See W. Schnyder-Spross, Die Familie Rahn von Zürich (Zurich, Schulthess, 1951), pp. 125–169
(father), 262–279 (son). See also R. Wolf, Biographien zur Kulturgeschichte der Schweiz (Zurich,
Orell, Füssli & Co., 1858–62), iv, pp. 55–66.
4 British Library, London [hereafter: BL], MS Add. 4423, fos. 50–51, referring to Pell’s gift as ‘that
dispute about the measurement of the circle’ (‘Certamen illud cyclometricum’): this was Pell’s
Controversiae de vera circuli mensura … pars prima (Amsterdam, 1647).
5 Bodleian Library, Oxford [hereafter: Bodl.], MS Aubrey 6, fo. 55 r ; BL, MS Add. 4424, fo. 260 r
(‘Pellij discipulus’); BL, MS Add. 4278, fo. 80 r (Pell to Thomas Brancker, 5 March 1666 (quotation)
(unfortunately these ‘coppies’ have not survived). Cf. also the other evidence cited in N.
Malcolm, ‘The Publications of John Pell F.R.S. (1611–1685): some new light, and some old confusions’,
Notes Rec. R. Soc. Lond. 54, 275–292 (2000), here pp. 286–287.
6 BL, MS Add. 4365, fos. 5–6, Rahn to Pell, 3 Mar. 1658 (fo. 5 r : ‘quot horas dulcissimas’).
7 Rahn, Teutsche Algebra, sig. XX2 r (‘In den Solutionen, und grad auch in der Arithmetic bediene
ich mich einer ganz neuen manier … die ich von einer hohen und sehr gelehrten Person erstmals
erlehnet hab … Dieser form bestehet in einem dreyfachen Margine’); pp. 8 (division sign), 187
(Pell’s theorem). On Pell’s tri-columnar method see J. A. Stedall, A Discourse concerning algebra:
English algebra to 1685 (Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 137–138.
8 See the letter from Pell to Haak of 13 June 1666, cited below at note 10.
9 J. H. Rahn [‘Rhonius’], An Introduction to Algebra, Translated out of the High-Dutch into
English, by Thomas Brancker, M. A., Much Altered and Augmented by D. P. [ sc. Doctor Pell]
(London, 1668); for details of the history of the project see ibid., sig. A2 r (‘The Translator’s
Preface’); BL, MS Add. 4414, fo. 10 r (Collins, ‘The Publisher’s preface’, annotated by Pell ‘not
sent, not printed’); C. J. Scriba, ‘John Pell’s English Edition of J. H. Rahn’s Teutsche Algebra’,
in For Dirk Struik: scientific, historical and political essays in honor of Dirk J. Struik (ed. R. S.
Cohen, J. J. Stachel and M. M. Wartofsky), pp. 261–274 (Dordrecht, Reidel, 1974); and the
account given in N. Malcolm and J. A. Stedall, John Pell (1611–1685) and his correspondence
with Sir Charles Cavendish: the mental world of an early modern mathematician (Oxford
University Press, in the press).
10 Bodl., MS Aubrey 13, fo. 91 v ; ‘Graffschaft’ means ‘county’.
11 This refers to the large illustrations (copied from Hooke) in the review of Hooke’s Micrographia