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I am looking for a (hopefully eventually comprehensive) list of examples of books or works that are:

  • written by an originator of a field of mathematics, and about that field
  • written by a pioneer of a field of mathematics, who introduced important ideas or concepts, and about those ideas or concepts

There are many reasons motivating this - the short form is that often it is a good idea to read the thoughts of the originator of a field to understand their motivations or how they arrived at the ideas.

I don't want to exclude substantial reading material that isn't specifically a book, so here are some rough rules. I am looking for books, papers, manuscripts, lecture notes, or correspondences over 50 pages, or collections of those over 50 pages in total (eg 5 papers of 5 pages each + manuscript of 25 pages). I chose 50 as it's a comfortable number to say that a collection has the contents of a thin book. Additionally video or audio recordings of over 5 hours are admissible, where each hour counts for 10 pages in the above calculation. Other forms of writing are allowed too, in case I forgot something.

I am not looking for substantially shorter works or collections of those. Anything under 40 pages is strictly unsuitable for this list.

Here are some examples:

  • Euclid's Elements
  • Fermat's collected works
  • Grothendieck's EGA and SGA
  • Isaac Newton - Principia Mathematica
  • Briefwechsel Cantor-Dedekind, by E. Noether and J. Cavaillès, Paris, Hermann & Co, 1937
  • (Physics) Ernst Mach - Mechanics
  • (Chemistry) Linus Pauling - Introduction to Chemistry

Please could you include the following. Not all of those are strictly required, but they will help others:

  • the author
  • what their contribution was to the field
  • name of work (in the language that's on the work and if you can in English)
  • a rough description of whether the work (book/paper/etc) talks about the claimed contribution
  • rough amount of reading pages (or hours if audio/video)
  • where it was printed
  • the year of printing,
  • a place to obtain a copy, like a modern re-print, translation from Latin, Greek, or Arabic, etc.

If you so desire and it is allowed by Math Overflow, please include an image of the title page or of a page that touches on the important topic of the book in a very poignant way. Da Vinci's drawing of a screw helicopter would be an example here.

Here are some relevant, but not quite similar, questions:

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  • $\begingroup$ I think this question is too broad for MO. It's more suitable for a personal blog or some kind of collaborative wiki like the OEIS and not for a Q&A site like MO. $\endgroup$
    – Timothy Chow
    Commented May 14, 2022 at 17:48
  • $\begingroup$ What does Pauling and Da Vinci have to do with a "field of mathematics"? $\endgroup$
    – Somos
    Commented May 15, 2022 at 0:00
  • $\begingroup$ @Somos Pauling has nothing to do with mathematics, hence the book was prefixed as being in the field of Chemistry. Da Vinci contributed to mechanics (which you may or may not see as mathematics) and geometry. $\endgroup$
    – cheater
    Commented May 15, 2022 at 1:24
  • $\begingroup$ @TimothyChow if you look at the links I provided to questions in similar vein, you will see that they have been fruitfully contributed to. This sort of question is why the "big-list" tag exists in the first place. $\endgroup$
    – cheater
    Commented May 15, 2022 at 1:25
  • $\begingroup$ @cheater I think that the difference is that you mentioned the word "comprehensive" in your question. MO isn't the right venue for a comprehensive list of the type you're asking for. If you set up some other site for a comprehensive list, and then ask on MO for some suggestions for titles that you may have missed, then you might get a better reception. $\endgroup$
    – Timothy Chow
    Commented May 15, 2022 at 1:49

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