The subject of the present research project is the critical edition, fully annotated with commentary, of a corpus of 95 letters (ca. 500 typewritten pages) exchanged from 1714 to 1722 between the mathematicians Johann I Bernoulli (1667-1748) and Pierre Varignon (1654-1722). About two thirds of the Bernoulli-Varignon correspondence have been already edited (Der Briefwechsel von Johann I Bernoulli. Band 2 and Band 3). With the edition of this last group of letters, the edition of the Bernoulli-Varignon correspondence will be completed and made accessible in its entirety to the scholarly community.

The Bernoulli-Varignon correspondence represents one part of the Bernoulli correspondence, which comprises the epistolary exchanges of seven mathematicians and physicists of the Bernoulli family with several important figures of the scientific community of their time. With its 253 preserved letters, the correspondence with Varignon is one of the most substantial of the corpus. In the letters, two exceptionally well networked scholars treat of a wide variety of scientific subjects.

The two correspondents concerned are central figures in the scientific landscape of their time. Johann I Bernoulli is justly regarded as a mathematician and physicist of world renown.  Pierre Varignon for his part played an important role as a mediator in the scientific discourse of this time.

The edition which is here proposed aims at providing scholars with access to an important body of hitherto unpublished source material. The letters concerned are essential for the study of the history of mathematics and physics and for the understanding of the role of Johann I Bernoulli and Pierre Varignon in the scientific discourse of their time. Moreover, the Bernoulli-Varignon correspondence constitutes an important document of scientific interchange and communication in 18th-century Europe.

The edition is planned to appear simultaneously in the form of a printed book and of an online edition in open-access. This will ensure that the benefits of both forms of publication will be brought together. The printed version will follow in structure and concept the already published volumes of the Bernoulli-Varignon correspondence, while the online publication will follow the concept of the already extant Basler Edition der Bernoulli-Briefwechsel (BEBB).

The text of the edition will be established through an accurate transcription of the manuscript documents, double-checked through a process of collation by recourse to the originals. The transcription will be carried out following the editorial rules already outlined for the BEBB (http://www.ub.unibas.ch/bernoulli/index.php/Editionsrichtlinien). The editorial text will comprise an introduction, the metadata of the letters, a philological-critical apparatus, an apparatus of notes concerning the mathematical and historical content of the letters, a bibliography of the (printed or manuscript) works mentioned in the correspondence, as well as a subject and a name index. The online version will include in addition high resolution scans of the original manuscripts provided by the University Library of Basel. The online edition of the Bernoulli-Varignon correspondence will be available in open access, not behind any form of pay-wall.

The target group of this edition are mathematicians, physicists, historians of science and philosophy, historians of the 18th century and all those more generally interested in the history of science.

Importantly, the realisation of the project would ensure the continuation of the fruitful exchange between the Bernoulli-Euler-Zentrum and Prof. Dr. Lukas Rosenthaler and Dr. des. Tobias Schweizer of the Digital Humanities Lab (DHLab) of the University of Basel. In collaboration with the BEZ, the DHLab plans to realise a modern online platform for the presentation of the whole Bernoulli correspondence that will substitute the already existing web presentation of the BEBB.