Abhandlungen über die Algebraische Auflösung der Gleichungen

Berlin: Julius Springer, 1889. FIRST EDITION OF THE GERMAN TRANSLATION. Half-marbled cloth over marbled boards; a fantastic copy. First edition of this German translation. The relevant treatises of Abel (1802-1829) and Galois (1811-1832) are combined here in these treatise on the algebraic solution of equations. This was the first time that Galois had been translated into German.

Along with Galois, who generalized Abel’s investigations into the insolvability of equations (Abel-Ruffini’s theorem or the so-called Galois theory), Abel, a Norwegian mathematician, was an important co-founder of group theory.

Galois, who died at the age of 20 years and seven months (in 1832) from wounds received in a mysterious duel, left a body of work -- for the most part published posthumously -- of less than 100 pages, the astonishing richness of which was revealed in the second half of the nineteenth century. Continuing the work of Abel, he produced with the aid of group theory a definitive answer to the problem of the solvability of algebraic equations, a problem that had absorbed the attention of mathematicians since the eighteenth century; he thereby laid one of the foundations of modern algebra.