LAGRANGE, Joseph Louis.

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Méchanique analitique. First edition of the author's masterpiece, the first textbook to treat mechanics in a purely analytical manner, and the work which outlined the discovery of the general equations of motion. It "occupies a place in the history of the subject second only to Newton's Principia" (Wolf, p. 19).Published almost exactly a century after the Principia (1687), the Méchanique analitique extended and formalized Newton's work. "While the Principia created and organized the science of mechanics, Lagrange's effort was to bring a large portion of what was known about mechanics in his day under one principle - the Principle of Virtual Work" (Boissonnade & Vagliente, p. xii). Lagrange's work was also distinguished by the elegance and simplicity of its prose. In the preface, Lagrange drew attention to the complete absence of diagrams in the book, which he believed were rendered obsolete by the lucidity of his writing. Somewhat unusually for a scientific treatise of the time, Lagrange began each section with a historical overview and a critical analysis of the work of his predecessors, especially the Bernoullis, Clairaut, d'Alembert, Euler, and Laplace.

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