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Origins of Life on Earth is a short (16 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. A full list of collection documents is available upon request.

origins of life on earth

philosophy and Methodology of science

Philosophy and Methodology of Science contains ~45 documents and traces scientific thought from Bacon’s inductive Novum Organum through Whewell and Mill’s logics and Comte’s positivism. Poincaré and Einstein examine hypotheses, intuition, and mathematics’ relation to reality. Bridgman introduces operationalism, while Carnap explores logical reconstruction and testability. Popper’s falsifiability and critical rationalism contrast with Kuhn’s paradigm shifts and Lakatos’s research programmes. Hempel analyzes scientific explanation, while Duhem explores holism and underdetermination. Recurring threads include the demarcation of science, its growth through conjecture and criticism, the interplay between physics and philosophy—particularly in relativity and quantum theory—and mathematics’ “unreasonable effectiveness,” as described by Wigner. Together, the works illustrate how science progresses through evolving methods, conceptual revolutions, and ongoing philosophical reflection.

FINGERPRINTING and OTHER personal identification

A very small collection (~15 documents), Fingerprinting and other 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. A full list of collection documents is available upon request.

chaos: the emergence of a new science

The idea that a butterfly flapping its wings might ultimately influence the weather half a world away has become one of science's most familiar metaphors. It grew out of a startling discovery: even when a system follows precise mathematical rules, tiny differences in its starting conditions can make its long-term behavior impossible to predict.

This collection (approximately 15 works) traces the origins and development of chaos theory through foundational scientific papers and books. Edward Lorenz's research on weather prediction helped establish the importance of sensitivity to initial conditions, while David Ruelle and Floris Takens investigated the mathematics of turbulence. Later papers by Tien-Yien Li and James Yorke and biologist Robert May revealed how chaotic behavior could emerge from surprisingly simple equations. Works by Benoit Mandelbrot explore the intricate geometry of fractals, closely associated with the study of chaos.

The holdings also include Ray Bradbury's “A Sound of Thunder” (1952), which imagined the consequences of a seemingly insignificant event, and James Gleick's Chaos (1987), which introduced the field to a broad readership.

What if the fact that we are alive today could tell us something about how long humanity will survive? This is the unsettling premise of the Doomsday Argument, which uses probability theory and assumptions about our place among all humans who will ever exist to assess the likelihood of humanity's long-term survival.

This collection (approximately 15 documents) traces the emergence of the argument and the ensuing debate. It includes John Leslie's early papers developing the theory, J. Richard Gott's 1993 application of the Copernican principle to humanity's future, and challenges by William Eckhardt, Kevin Korb, and Jonathan Oliver. Nick Bostrom's subsequent work examines the assumptions about observers and probability on which the argument depends.

Books by Leslie, Willard Wells, and William Poundstone extend the discussion to broader questions about existential risk and human extinction. Together, these publications illustrate how a seemingly simple statistical question has provoked decades of disagreement about probability, cosmology, and whether mathematical reasoning can meaningfully predict humanity's future.

the doomsday argument

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."

This collection was sold at auction through Freeman’s in May 2026.

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.