The Secrets of Archimedes

Originally shared by Spherical Trigonometry

The Secrets of Archimedes
Archimedes lived in the third century B.C., but the story begins in 10th century Constantinople, where an anonymous scribe copied Archimedes’ treatises onto parchment. Three centuries later, a monk in need of parchment erased the Archimedes text and then cut and refolded the leaves to create a Greek Orthodox prayer book. This process of reuse is called palimpsesting; the resulting work is a palimpsest. In the early 20th century, a scholar named Johan Ludvig Heiberg discovered the manuscript and transcribed as much of the underlying text as he could. He published his findings in an academic journal.
In 1999, a private collector who purchased it at auction then deposited it at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore where the Archimedes Palimpsest was examined by a team of researchers who undertook a lengthy project of attempting to read the complete erased texts. The process involved four years of painstaking conservation, the use of state-of-the-art imaging techniques, and the expertise of more than 80 specialists. Will Noel, the Walters’ curator of manuscripts at the time, noted that what scholars ultimately found “fundamentally reinterpreted key treatises by Archimedes, important passages of which we were able to decipher for the first time.” The greatest discoveries were two previously unknown texts: Method, which proposed the concept of calculating with infinity, and Stomachion, which may be the earliest work in the field of combinatorics, the heart of modern computer science.
Noel speculates that if the treatises in the 10th century manuscript had not been palimpsested into the religious prayer book, they might never have survived at all, which could make the Archimedes Palimpsest the most important story in the history of science in our time.