RICHARD P. FEYNMAN'S SIGNED AND ANNOTATED COPIES OF PIERCE'S "SHORT TABLE OF INTEGRALS"

8vo. 156 pp. Green publisher's cloth, rubbed. SIGNED ON FRONT FLY-LEAF "FEYNMAN, RICHARD P. / DEPT. OF PHYSICS/ PRINCETON, N.J." AND ANNOTATED BY FEYNMAN IN PENCIL AND BLACK INK. AND: Another copy. 8vo. 156 pp. Green publisher's cloth, rubbed. SIGNED ON FRONT FLY-LEAF "R.P. FEYNMAN. DEPT. PHYSICS, CORNELL UNIV." AND ANNOTATED BY HIM IN PENCIL, AND BLACK, BLUE, AND RED INK. WITH: A Short Table of Integrals. Abridged Edition.  Boston: Ginn and Company, 1942. 8vo. 32 pp. Original cloth-backed printed wrappers. SIGNED "FEYNMAN" ON FRONT COVER IN PENCIL.

FEYNMAN'S LOVE OF INTEGRALS. An extraordinary lot, pairing Feynman's two heavily annotated personal copies (the first from his graduate student days at Princeton, the second as a young professor at Cornell) of this deceptively slim, but densely packed fin-de-siècle collection of elusive integrals, bookending Feynman's years at Los Alamos, 1943-45.  One certainly imagines the Princeton copy to have been on his desk & well-within reach during the Manhattan Project, long before the advent of high speed computers permitted simple numerical evaluation of intractable integrals. Both volumes are heavily annotated (in fact, nearly, but not quite identically so...) with Feynman's own favorite mathematical exotica & personal predilections. An abridged version of Pierce, focused on the barest essentials, complements the Cornell copy. As an ensemble, they speak eloquently to Feynman's mathematical toolbox being well-stocked, and interestingly, also already well-formed by 1942.  In this regard, possession of Pierce would be characteristic of any pre-WWII physicist; a bit of contrast to the iconic figure known to later generations. While Feynman famously embraced the big picture view of science, he nevertheless always relished the calculational aspects of the craft; his 40's-era desktop editions of Pierce attest heartily to that....