Riverbank Publications No. 75 : Memorization Methods : Specifically Illustrated in Respect to Their Applicability to Codes and Topographic Material - Rare Book Insider
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Riverbank Publications No. 75 : Memorization Methods : Specifically Illustrated in Respect to Their Applicability to Codes and Topographic Material

First Edition. 50 pages 28.7 cm x 22.2 cm. Publisher's stiff tan wrappers with black printed front cover duplicating title page. No statement of limitation. Number "116" circled at top of front wrapper. Staples rusted and should be replaced, occasional light staining from damp, center pages coming loose at staples. Wraps. Not normally included in the so-called 'Riverbank Publications' which included numbers 15-22, this is one example of other work published by Riverbank in related fields. Shulman, An Annotated Bibliography of Cryptography, 1976, p. 83 (which attributes authorship to H. O. Nolan).
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A Symmetrical Notation for Numbers [offprint lacking the blue wrappers]

Shannon, Claude E. [Elwood] 90-93 pages. 10 x 7 1/8 inches. A single sheet folded but lacking the original blue printed wrappers. Wraps. The American Mathematical Monthly first published this article in Vol 57, (Feb. 1950), pp 90-93. We offer here the original offprint issue but without the original blue printed wrappers. While we don't understand the mathematics here, one comment is fun: "If we were using this notation, department stores would find it much more difficult to camouflage the price of goods with $.98 labels." The typescript carbon in Shannon's files finishes there. But the final paper [ as offered here ] includes additional material, including a final paragraph explaining one reason for this notation: "Symmetrical notation offers attractive possibilities for general-purpose computing machines of the electronic or relay types. In these machines, it is possible to perform the calculations in any desired scale and only translate to the scale ten at input and output. The use of asymmetrical notation simplifies many of the circuits required to take care of signs in addition and subtraction, and to properly round off numbers." (p.93) "At the close of the decade, the [American Mathematical] Monthly published a beautiful, long paper by Andre Weil called the Future of Mathematics. It also published a short note in computer science by Claude Shannon called "A Symmetrical Notation for Numbers." Both papers foretold the future of mathematics." (Ewing, p. 134) PROVENANCE: The personal files of Claude E. Shannon (unmarked). There were multiple examples of this item in Shannon's files. REFERENCES: Sloane and Wyner, "Claude Elwood Shannon Collected Papers," #57 Ewing, John H., "A Century of Mathematics : Through the Eyes of the Monthly", p.134, 201-204.
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Mathematical Theory of the Differential Analyzer [offprint]

Shannon, Claude E. [Elwood] 337-354 pages. 9 15/16 x 6 7/8 inches. Publisher's pale green printed wrappers. Stapled near the spine (several rust stains). Soft crease to upper right corners. Wraps. The Journal of Mathematics and Physics, Vol XX, No. 4, December 1941, first published this paper. Here offered in offprint form. As he was completing his undergraduate work in Michigan, Shannon noticed [a note tacked to a bulletin board] in the spring of 1936 "just as he was considering what was to come after his undergraduate days were over. The job - master's student and assistant on the differential analyzer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology - was tailor-made for a young man who could find equal joy in equations and construction, thinking, and building. 'I pushed hard for that job and got it. That was one of the luckiest things of my life,' Shannon would later say.Shannon's study of the electrical switches directing the guts of that mechanical behemoth led him to an insight at the foundation of our digital age: that switches could do far more than control the flow of electricity through circuits - that they could be used to evaluate any logical statement we could think of, could even appear to 'decide'.That leap, as Walter Isaacson put it, 'became the basic concept underlying all digital computers.' It was Shannon's first great feat of abstraction. He was only twenty-one." (Mind at Play, xii, xiii, 20) In 1938 in his monumental master's thesis "A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits," Shannon published that leap. A few years later, he published the mathematical theory behind the Differential Analyzer [as here] in some detail. "The Differential Analyzer is a machine developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under the direction of Dr. V. [Vannevar] Bush for the purpose of obtaining numerical solutions to ordinary differential equations. The fundamental principles underlying the Differential Analyzer were first conceived by Lord Kelvin, but at the time, it was impossible, due to mechanical difficulties, to construct a machine of the type he contemplated. The same principles were discovered independently by Dr. Bush and his associates, and the first Differential Analyzer was completed in 1931. The inherent mechanical difficulties were overcome by means of several ingenious devices such as torque amplifiers, backlash correcting units, and improved machine working technologies . In this paper, the mathematical aspects of the Differential Analyzer will be considered. The most important results deal with conditions under which functions of one or more variables can be generated and conditions under which ordinary differential equations can be solved. Some attention will also be given to approximation of functions (which cannot be generated exactly), approximation of gear ratios, and automatic speed control" (Introduction, pp 337-338) PROVENANCE: The personal files of Claude E. Shannon (unmarked). There were multiple examples of this item in Shannon's files. REFERENCES: Sloane and Wyner, "Claude Elwood Shannon Collected Papers," #6 Soni and Goodman, "A Mind at Play - How Claude Shanon Invented the Information Age," Simon and Schuster: 2017.
  • $880
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Two-Way Communication Channels

Shannon, Claude E. [Elwood] 611-644 pages. 10 1/16 x 6 3/4 inches. Stapled self-wrappers. Creased, some minor soiling. Wraps. The Proceedings of the Fourth Berkeley Symposium Probability and Statistics first published this paper. The construction of this item leaves us a little unsure of its intended use. It could be an offprint, but it lacks the usual separate wrapper or reprint statement. It could also be stapled, trimmed extracts from the Symposium's preprints or transactions. The layout and details appear the same as the digitalized Proceedings. Regardless, it is the form of the paper that Shannon was distributing when requested. Lacking any additional information, and realizing it was in the author's personal files, we lean toward it being an offprint for the author's use. ".The problem is to communicate in both directions through the channel as effectively as possible. Particularly, we wish to determine what pairs of signaling rates R1 and R2 for the two directions can be approached with arbitrarily small error probabilities." (introduction) PROVENANCE: The personal files of Claude E. Shannon (unmarked). There were multiple examples of this item in Shannon's files. REFERENCES: Sloane and Wyner, "Claude Elwood Shannon Collected Papers," #119 Hook and Norman, "Origins of Cyberspace," #899 Reprinted in D. Slepian, editor, "Key Papers in the Development of Information Theory," IEEE Press, NY, 1974, pp 339-372 Proceedings Fourth Berkeley Symposium Probability and Statistics, June 20 - July 30, 1960, edited by J. Neyman, Univ. Calif. Press, Berkeley, CA, Vol. 1, 1961, pp. 611-644.
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Probability of Error for Optimal Codes in a Gaussian Channel [Bell Monograph]

Shannon, Claude E. [Elwood] Later printing. 46, [2-blank] pages. 10 7/8 x 8 3/8 inches (275 x 213 mm) Original wrappers, printed in grey, light blue, and black. Stapled with five holes punched at the spine as issued. A bright, clean copy. Wraps. The Bell System Technical Journal, Vol 38, pp 611-656, May 1959 first published this paper. A separate Bell System Technical Journal offprint of this paper does exist, so this Bell Telephone System Technical Publications Monograph (#3259:July 1959) is a later printing. "A study is made of coding and decoding systems for a continuous channel with an additive gaussian noise and subject to an average power limitation at the transmitter. Upper and lower bounds are found for the error probability in decoding with optimal codes and decoding systems. These bounds are close together for signaling rates near channel capacity and also for signaling rates near zero, but diverge between. Curves exhibiting these bounds are given." (abstract) PROVENANCE: The personal files of Claude E. Shannon (unmarked). There were multiple examples of this item in Shannon's files. REFERENCES: Sloane and Wyner, "Claude Elwood Shannon Collected Papers," #117 Hook and Norman, "Origins of Cyberspace," #898 (incorrectly referencing this item as an offprint) COLLECTORS NOTE: The Bell Telephone System Monograph series offered a way to obtain individual articles by Bell scientists regardless of where their work was first published. Many Monographs significantly postdate the original article publication. Because of this, they rarely constitute the coveted (and traditional) article offprint. If the journal of record issued no offprint, the Monograph might be the first separate publication - the closest the collector can come to a traditional offprint. We have done our best to place each Monograph properly in the article's publishing history and welcome any corrections or additional information, especially regarding issues unknown to us.
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A Universal Turing Machine with Two Internal States

A Universal Turing Machine with Two Internal States

Shannon, Claude E. [Elwood]; McCarthy, J. (editor with Shannon) [1 (title page)], [1 (blank verso)], 157-165, [3 (blank)] pages. 10 x 7 inches. Stapled printed self-wrappers, with leaves trimmed at the spine. Light staining at foreedge The construction of this item is unusual. It consists of separate leaves of the printed paper in the original journal fonts, with a new title page "AUTOMATA STUDIES" (blank verso) and an added trailing blank leaf, all stapled at the spine. All examined copies from Shannon's files are the same, leading us to conclude it was likely an author offprint even though a reprint statement is not present. Wraps. Originally printed as an internal Bell Laboratories Memorandum: Number 54-114-38, May 15, 1954. "Automata Studies," Annals of Mathematics Studies number 34, 1956 (edited by Claude Shannon and John McCarthy), first published this Shannon paper as "A Universal Turing Machine With Two Internal States" on pages 157-165. "Our main result is to show that a universal Turing machine can be constructed using one tape and having only two internal states. It will also be shown that it is impossible to do this with one internal state. Finally, a construction is given for a universal Turing machine with only two tape symbols." (p 158 of introduction) "A Turing machine which, by appropriate programming using a finite length of input tape, can act as any Turing machine whatsoever. In his seminal paper, Turing himself gave the first construction for a universal Turing machine (Turing 1937, 1938). Shannon (1956) showed that two colors were sufficient, so long as enough states were used. [ as here ]" Wolfram Mathworld PROVENANCE: The personal files of Claude E. Shannon (unmarked). There were multiple examples of this item in Shannon's files. REFERENCES: Sloane and Wyner, "Claude Elwood Shannon Collected Papers," #93.
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General Treatment of the Problem of Coding [reproduced typescript]

General Treatment of the Problem of Coding [reproduced typescript]

Shannon, C. E. [Claude Elwood] [1]-6 leaves. 10 7/8 x 8 3/8 inches. Reproduced typescript, stapled upper left. Dated in type on the last page. Wraps. The "Report of Proceedings, Symposium on Information Theory" (London) first published this paper in Sept. 1950." The "Transactions of the IRE Professional Group on Information Theory" reprinted it in Volume: 1, Issue: 1, Feb. 1953, pages 102-104, Feb. 1953. We are not aware of offprints from either publication. Offered here is a reproduced typescript of the paper from Shannon's file predating the first publication. We have not compared it to the published papers. Shannon defines a typical communication system as consisting of five elements: 1) an information source. 2) an encoding or transmitting element. 3) a channel on which the signal is transmitted from transmitter to receiver. 4) a receiving and decoding device that recovers the original message from the received signal. And 5) the destination of the information. From the Abstract: ".The central problems to be considered are how one can measure the capacity of a channel for transmitting information; how this capacity depends on various parameters such as bandwidth, available transmitter power and type of noise; and what is the best encoding system for a given information source to utilize a channel most efficiently." PROVENANCE: The personal files of Claude E. Shannon (unmarked). One of three examples in Shannon's files. REFERENCES: Sloane and Wyner, "Claude Elwood Shannon Collected Papers," #61.
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Computers and Automata [Methodos offprint]

Computers and Automata [Methodos offprint]

Shannon, Claude E. [Elwood] Later printing. 115-130 pages plus wrappers. 234 x 188 mm. (9 1/4 x 6 5/8 inches). Printed light green printed wrappers. Tanned pages, light browning to the extremities. Lower left corner bumped. Reprinted by kind permission of the Author and the Editors from the Proceedings of the I.R.E. October 1953." Wraps. First published in the famous "Computer Issue" of the Proceedings of the Institute of Radio Engineers (Vol. 41, 1953, pp. 1234-1241), we are unaware of any IRE offprints of this paper. Thus the Bell Telephone System Monograph series (#2150: March 1954) constitutes the first separate appearance. Reprinted in Methodos [as here], Vol. 6 (1954), pp. 115-130. The Methodos reprint lacks both the sample checker program game and notes by Strachey. Methodos was a quarterly serial issued by the "Centro italiano di metodologia e analisi del linguaggio" [Italian Center for Language Methodology and Analysis] which survived from 1949-1964, 16 volumes, Numbers 1 thru 62. (OCLC Acc#: 1695345) "This paper reviews briefly some of the recent developments in the field of automata and nonnumerical computation. A number of typical machines are described, including logic machines, game-playing machines, and learning machines. Some theoretical questions and developments are discussed, such as a comparison of computers and the brain, Turing's formulation of computing machines, and von Neumann's models of self-reproducing machines." (summary, p 130). "A brief review of developments in the field of automata and non-numerical computation. Included are descriptions of logic machines, game-playing machines, learning machines, Turing's formulation of computing machines, and von Neumann's models of self-reproducing machines. The paper was written for the special computer issue of the Proceedings of the IRE." (Origins of Cyberspace) In his review of this article for The Journal of Symbolic Logic (Vol 19), Alonzo Church describes it as ".an excellent descriptive non-technical article." PROVENANCE: The personal files of Claude E. Shannon (unmarked). There were seven examples of this item in Shannon's files. REFERENCES: Sloane and Wyner, "Claude Elwood Shannon Collected Papers," #82 Hook and Norman, "Origins of Cyberspace," #885.
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