The Axioms of Descriptive Geometry.

Reprint [1st ed. 1907]. 8vo. pp. viii, 74, 2 (pubs. list); very good in original printed wrappers, chipped to extremities, "WHITEHEAD" written in ink along spine. In 1906 and 1907 Whitehead produced two small volumes - The Axioms of Projective Geometry and the present work - for the series Cambridge Tracts in Mathematics and Mathematical Physics. Written during the same years that he was working with Bertrand Russell on their Principia Mathematica (1910-13), the Cambridge tracts were composed in traditional notation, rather than the notations of symbolic logic employed for the Principia. Nonetheless, Whitehead adopts an axiomatic approach, and writes in his Preface "after the statement of the axioms, the ideas considered are those concerning the association of Projective and Descriptive Geometry by means of ideal points, point to point correspondence, congruence, distance, and metrical geometry". The present copy is the 1914 reprint by CUP, one of the niceties of which is that Whitehead and Russell's Principia Mathematica features in the publisher’s list at the rear.…