an unpublished letter from henry oldenburg to johann heinrich rahn

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Downloaded from rsnr.royalsocietypublishing.org on December 6, 2012 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
Downloaded from rsnr.royalsocietypublishing.org on December 6, 2012 262 Noel Malcolm in the Journal des sçavans, no. 42, 10 December 1666 (reprinted in Le Journal des sçavans, ed. ‘le sieur de Hedonville’ [D. de Sallo] (Amsterdam, 1685), i, pp. 738–749). 12 St Andrews University Library [hereafter: StAUL], MS 31009, fo. 32 v . This is printed, but with some serious inaccuracies (e.g. ‘Pahn’ for ‘Rahn’, ‘vitri’ for ‘Rotae’) in James Gregory Tercentenary Memorial Volume (ed. H. W. Turnbull), pp. 202–203 (London, 1939). The italics in the final sentence here represent underlining in the MS. In this and the other letters transcribed in this article, expanded contractions are placed in square brackets. The long sentence in the second paragraph of the letter is somewhat ungrammatical in its construction; this is reflected in the translation here. 13 Zentralbibliothek, Zurich, MSS C 114b and C 114a, respectively; the latter is also dated 1667. 14 The catalogue is in the Stadtbibliothek, Winterthur, MS Folio 12 (cited in E. Fueter, ‘Hans Heinrich Rahn als Wissenschafter’, in Schnyder-Spross, op. cit. (note 3), pp. 286–293; here p. 290). 15 StAUL, MS 31009, fo. 31 r . 16 Ibid., fos 31–32 (printed, with minor inaccuracies, in Turnbull, op. cit. (note 12), pp. 198–204; Turnbull also misidentifies the entire draft by Collins as ‘the transcript of the letter from Rhonius to Haake’ (p. 205, n. 13)). 17 StAUL, MS 31009, fo. 31 r . 18 BL, MS Add. 4278, fo. 129r (Pell to Collins, 5 July 1669, thanking him for the offer of ‘a chamber in your house’); Correspondence of Scientific Men of the Seventeenth Century (ed. S. J. Rigaud), 2 vols (Oxford University Press, 1841), ii, p. 197 (Collins to John Beale, 20 August 1672: ‘he boarded long at my house’). 19 See, for example, Rigaud, op. cit. (note 18), i, pp. 149 (Collins to de Sluse, October 1670), 196 (Collins to Beale, 20 August 1672); ii, p. 220 (Collins to Gregory, 25 March 1671). 20 See, for example, Rigaud, op. cit. (note 18), i, 149 (Collins to de Sluse, October 1670); ii, 303–304 (Collins to Newton, 19 July 1670); ii, p. 526 (Collins to Wallis, 21 March 1671). 21 StAUL, MS 31009, fo. 31 v . 22 For the ‘model’ and letter to de Sluse see OC vii, pp. 501–504; viii, pp. 15–22. 23 Some time after leaving Collins’s house, Pell took a room in an inn in Pall Mall, the street where Oldenburg lived: see BL, MS Add. 4424, fo. 78 r (a note recording Pell’s presence there in September 1671). 24 BL, MS Add. 4278, fo. 149 r . 25 See StAUL, MS 31009, fo. 47 (Collins to Gregory, 8 Nov. 1672) (printed, with minor inaccuracies, in Turnbull, op. cit. (note 12), p. 247). 26 Royal Society, MS 81 (Commercium epistolicum), no. 26, 1st leaf, recto: ‘Pellius promittit multa de his, sed quando’; for Collins’s draft see OC xi, pp. 256–257, and for the text of Leibniz’s reply, ibid., xi, pp. 395–396. 27 Gerard Kinckhuysen, Algebra, ofte stel-konst, beschreven tot dienst van de leerlinghen (Haarlem, 1661); De grondt der meet-konst, ofte een korte verklaringe der keegel-sneeden, met een byvoeghsel (Haarlem, 1660). The identity of the third work mentioned here is less certain. The review of Ferguson’s work in Philosophical Transactions of The Royal Society (see below, note 28) referred to one book by Kinckhuysen as ‘A Collection of Geometrical Problems, Analytically solv’d’ (p. 998); this was apparently the same work as the one listed here by Oldenburg, and from this it would also appear that the title used by Oldenburg was more a description than a reproduction of the title page. The book was probably Kinckhuysen’s Geometria ofte meet-konst (Haarlem, 1663), which does contain some geometrical problems as examples in the text. 28 Johan Jacob Ferguson, Labyrinthus algebriae … verhandelende de ontbindinge der … vergelijckingen (The Hague, 1667). This work had attracted the interest of both Collins and Oldenburg, being favourably reviewed in Philosophical Transactions, no. 49 (19 July 1669), pp. 996–999. On 17 June 1669 Collins had described it in a letter to John Wallis as ‘a book called Labyrinthus Algebrae, wherein he solves cubic and biquadratic equations by such new methods as render the roots in their proper species, when it may be done … and likewise improves the general method ….
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