Traite De La Lumiere Ou Sont Expliquees Les Causes De Ce Qui Luy Arrive Dans La Reflexion Dans Le

by Christiaan Huygens

$250,000 · Offered by Sophia Rare Books

First edition · Signed

Leiden: Pieter van der Aa, 1690. / First edition, first issue, an extremely rare large-paper presentation copy inscribed by Huygens to Pierre Daniel Huet, Bishop of Soissons and Avranches. Completed in 1678 and held back for twelve years, the Traité is the founding statement of the wave theory of light. Huygens's principle — that every point of a wave front is the source of secondary spherical wavelets whose common tangent defines the

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