Intended for all readers - including magicians, detectives, musicians, orthopedic surgeons, and anthropologists - this book offers a thorough account of that most intriguing and most human of appendages: the hand. In this illustrated work, John Napier explores a wide range of absorbing subjects such[...]

When John Napier published his invention of logarithms in 1614 he was announcing one of the greatest advances in the history of mathematics, and log tables were used universally until the mid 1970s. With his Rabdologia, an ingenious calculating tool composed of numbered rods which came to be known a[...]