£300 - £500
(Pre‑Computer Era Number‑Theory) Dr. George Kavan (Jiří Kaván) Factor Tables Giving The Complete Decomposition Into Prime Factors of All Numbers up to 256,000 First English translated edition, square quarto (29cm x 29cm), publishers' red cloth, some light shelf wear, vg, MacMillan and Co, London, printed by the State Observatory, Stara Dala, 1937. Jiří Kaván. 'Rozklad všech čísel celých od 2 do 256000 v prvočinitele' being the first Czech (1934) edition. It is believed that most of the stock was destroyed during a period of political instability. In any case, the English translation is extremely rare, with no records of it appearing in auction listings. Jiří Kaván (1877–1933) was a Czech astronomer and mathematical scholar who trained in mathematics, physics, and astronomy and served as chief assistant at the Astronomical Institute of the Czech University in Prague before becoming director of the astrophysical observatory at Stará Ďala in 1919. His lifelong interest in extensive numerical computation led him in 1917 to begin compiling an exhaustive table giving the complete prime factorisation of every integer from 1 up to 256, 000, a monumental manual calculation project undertaken with colleagues such as Dr. V. Zelinka and Miss B. Zubatá. The work was first published in Czech in 1934, and after his death in 1933 his wife, Madame Kavánová, oversaw the final proofreading and preparation of the English edition, which appeared in 1937 as Factor Tables Giving the Complete Decomposition into Prime Factors of All Numbers up to 256,000 (Macmillan, London). At the time, it was remarkable as one of the first complete factor tables extending beyond 100, 000 in scope and became a standard reference in pre‑computer era number theory tables. (Milne‑Thomson, L. M. (1938). Primes and Factors. Nature, 141, 454–455)
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