Leibniz: Explication de l’arithmétique binaire

Edition

“Explication de l’Arithmétique Binaire”, Mémoires de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, year 1703, pages 85 to 89, complete, from the scan of the Natural History Museum Library copy (Internet Archive, 300 ppi). Text built from the OCR of that scan, the long s read as s by comparison with the proofread Wikisource transcription of Gerhardt’s reprint (Leibnizens mathematische Schriften, vol. 7, 1863, pp. 223-227), then corrected word by word against the page images (116 corrections, recorded in the working scripts). The 1703 spelling, accents and ampersands are kept, including “zero”, “caracteres”, “piéces”, “vuide”, “tems”, “sçavoir”, “importans” and the misprint “seize par 100000” (for 10000); the long s is set as s, the ct ligature as two letters; words broken at the end of a line are rejoined, the running heads, signature mark (“L iij”) and catchword (“ne,”) are left out, the spacing of punctuation is modern French, and straight apostrophes are typographic. Italics follow the print. The Table des Nombres, printed down the margin of page 86, is set as a table after the paragraph that announces it, with its little zeros and its rules; the two small sums of page 86 follow the paragraph they illustrate; the examples of operations of page 86 are set as tables, the crossed-out digits of the division as struck 1s, and the signs that label the addition and the multiplication (a crescent and a circled dot) are drawn; the figure of the eight Cova of page 88 is redrawn in vector form with its digits, binary numbers and decimal numbers; the solid and broken lines of page 88 are drawn. The marginal note “1703. 5. Mai.” is given in the byline.

Rights

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz died in 1716 and the memoir was printed in the Mémoires of the Académie Royale des Sciences for the year 1703, in the early eighteenth century: public domain in France (author died more than 70 years ago) and in the United States (published before 1931). The poster is a new transcription and redraws the tables and the figure; it reproduces no image of the scan.

The scan used for the transcription is archive.org/details/histoiredelacad03laca (Biodiversity Heritage Library, NHM London); its metadata gives http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/ for the digitization, which the poster does not reproduce.