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Collections
rockets and space
Rockets and Space consists of ~100 documents relating to the development of rocketry and space exploration, including publications by Robert Esnault-Peltirie, P. E. Cleator, Frank Melina, Hermann Oberth, Willy Ley, Wernher von Braun, and others. It includes the first 15 volumes of Journal of the British Interplanetary Society (eight of which are in wrappers), and all 68 issues of Astronautics: The Journal of the American Rocket Society.
Search for extraterrestrial intelligence
Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence contains ~80 documents relating to the existence of and search for extraterrestrial life. The earliest work held in the collection is a 1795 paper by William Herschel suggesting that the sun is an inhabited planet! The collection covers the period from the 1790’s to the present, including works by Harlow Shapley, Fred Hoyle, Freeman Dyson, Carl Sagan, Arthur C. Clarke, Frank Drake, Frank Tipler, and many others.
philosophy of science
Philosophy of Science contains ~30 documents relating to the philosophy of science, including works by William Whewell, John Stuart Mill, Auguste Comte, Charles Dickens, Stanley Jevons, Henri Poincaré, Albert Einstein, Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, and others.
personal identification
A very small collection (~20 documents), Personal Identification focuses primarily on the history of traditional fingerprinting, also including several documents by Alan J. Jeffreys describing more recent identification methods of “retinal scanning” and “genetic fingerprinting.” The earliest documents in the collection are two 1880 papers, one by Henry Faulds and the other by W. J. Herschel, introducing the concept of fingerprint identification. The collection also includes later papers by others, including Francis Galton, Minakata Kumagusu, Edward Henry, and Charles B. Dunlap, Jr.
game theory
Game Theory is an extensive collection of works documenting the history of game theory, including its mathematical development as well as its many important real-world applications. This museum-quality, exhibition-ready collection is a carefully curated selection of trailblazing documents that have changed the way major decisions are made across the world. It includes many of the most important early works of game theory including Borel's and von Neumann's proofs of the "minimax theorem," Nash's introduction of the "Nash equilibrium," Schelling's work on non-cooperative games, Flood's paper defining the "prisoner's dilemma," Vickrey's work on "auction theory" and the papers by Kahn, Wohlstetter and Schelling on "war games."
communications/ information theory
A remarkably complete collection of works documenting the history of the theory of communication of information — what ‘information’ actually is, and what the theoretical restrictions on the accurate transmission from source to receiver truly are. This collection contains the most important early works in communications theory, including ten papers by Claude Shannon (including his "Mathematical Theory of Communication") plus famous works by Harry Nyquist, Ralph Hartley, Norbert Wiener, Dennis Gabor, W. R. Bennett, R. W. Hamming and many others. Most of these documents are presented in individual issues in their original paper wrappers.
origins of life on earth
Origins of Life on Earth is a short (18 document) collection containing important early theories of how life began on Earth. Includes works by William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), Svante Arrhenius, J. B. S.Haldane, A. I. Oparin, Harold Urey, Stanley Miller, and others.