In honor of Tech’s 125th birthday year, we’re partnering with Georgia Tech Alumni Magazine to highlight a piece of Tech history. This issue’s topic: one of the most important scientific books ever written.

The following excerpt is number 4 on the list “125 Pieces of Tech History,” featured in the September/October 2010 issue of Georgia Tech Alumni Magazine:

The Georgia Tech Library added a leather-bound, second-edition copy of Isaac Newton’s “Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica” to its rare-book collection in 1999.

A librarian told the Alumni Magazine at the time that it was one of only 750 copies printed by Cambridge University Press in 1713. First and third editions of the work, in which Newton presented the law of universal gravitation and three laws of motion, also are owned by the library.