Mathematical Treasure: Smith’s Edition of De Morgan’s Budget of Paradoxes

After his death, the wife of Augustus De Morgan (1806–1871) edited letters he had published in Athenaeum into the book Budget of Paradoxes (1872). In these letters, De Morgan classified and reviewed paradoxical books he had collected, including many standard types of faulty mathematical proofs—squarers of the circle, trisectors of the angle, duplicators of the cube, and constructors of perpetual motion—as well as “subverters of gravitation,” “stagnators of the earth,” and “builders of the universe.” In 1915, the American mathematics educator and book collector David Eugene Smith (1860–1944) published a second edition of the book’s two volumes.

The title page of volume 1 faced a portrait of De Morgan.

Smith provided Sophia De Morgan’s original preface as well as his own.

A different portrait of De Morgan appeared as the frontispiece for volume 2.

De Morgan’s comments on the possibilities of aviation.

These images are from the copies of volume 1 and volume 2 owned by the University of California and digitized by the Internet Archive.

Index to Mathematical Treasures