IVORY, Sir James. 15544

£35

Description

Autograph Letter Signed, to a bookseller, clarifying his orders for the Berlin Memoirs he requires. 1 page 8 x 5 inches, in good condition. Undated. Sir James Ivory (1765-1842), mathematician. He published in the Philosophical Transactions several important memoirs, which earned for him the Copley Medal in 1814 and ensured his election as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1815. Of special importance in the history of attractions is the first of these earlier memoirs (Phil. Trans., 1809), in which the problem of the attraction of a homogeneous ellipsoid upon an external point is reduced to the simpler case of the attraction of another but related ellipsoid upon a corresponding point interior to it. This theorem is known as Ivory’s theorem.