[RUSSELL.] HARKNESS, James, and Frank MORLEY.

Introduction to the Theory of Analytic Functions.

London, Macmillan & Co., 1898. 8vo, pp. xv, [1] errata, 336; Bertrand Russell’s copy, with his and Alys’s bookplate to the front pastedown, pencil ownership inscription (dated March 1899) to the half-title, and scattered notes in the text, more so at the beginning; subsequently in the possession of G. H. Hardy (‘generally recognized as the leading English mathematician of his time’, DNB), with his ink ownership inscription to the front pastedown, and left to the Library of New College, Oxford, with presentation plate and library stamp (subsequently cancelled) to the front free endpaper (dated 1948, the year after Hardy’s death); a well-read copy, a couple of gatherings sprung, in the original publisher’s cloth, spine lettered gilt, a few nicks along the spine, New College blind-stamp to the upper board. First edition of a work which had a profound impact on Bertrand Russell: ‘In 1898, Morley and Harkness [respectively professors of mathematics at Haverford and Bryn Mawr Colleges] published their textbook, An Introduction to the Theory of Analytic Functions, which, chastising other English textbooks for showing “little or no trace” of recent discoveries in pure mathematics, sought to introduce students to the theory of functions as it had been rebuilt by Weierstrass. An important feature of the book was the so-called “epsilon-delta” method, which showed how continuity could be treated arithmetically, without recourse to “infinitesimals”, without the need for any appeal to “intuition” and without logical contradiction. Russell studied Morley and Harkness’s book carefully, and, in introducing him to the system of Weierstrass, it had a large impact on his thinking – as he was to say many times in later life, his introduction to Weierstrass was one of the most important events in his intellectual life’ (Monk, p. 113).Although Russell valued the book, he did not read it without criticism. His few comments reflect an exact mind: in response to the first sentence of the entire book, for example, on ordinal numbers (‘Let us consider a row of objects with regard to their order, say from left to right, freeing ourselves from all notions of magnitude’), Russell has written: ‘It is a thousand pities to begin with left & right when the object is to free the subject from spatial intuition.’

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