A PRAYER FOR ARCHIMEDES-

[Ichingcarpenter]

Archimedes wrote his manuscript on a papyrus scroll 2,200 years ago. At an unknown later time, someone copied the text from papyrus to animal-skin parchment. Then, 700 years ago, a monk needed parchment for a new prayer book. He pulled the copy of Archimedes' book off the shelf, cut the pages in half, rotated them 90 degrees, and scraped the surface to remove the ink, creating a palimpsest—fresh writing material made by clearing away older text. Then he wrote his prayers on the nearly-clean pages.

For this was not just a prayer book. The faint Greek inscriptions and accompanying diagrams were, in fact, the only surviving copies of several works by the great Greek mathematician Archimedes.

An intensive research effort over the last nine years has led to the decoding of much of the almost-obliterated Greek text. The results were more revolutionary than anyone had expected. The researchers have discovered that Archimedes was working out principles that, centuries later, would form the heart of calculus and that he had a more sophisticated understanding of the concept of infinity than anyone had realized.


http://www.sciencenews.org/view/download/id/30878

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/8974/title/A_Prayer_for_Archimedes


Interesting article also and The Archimedes Codex, which describes this discovery and the other facets of the project. It is scheduled for release on Nov. 1 of this year.

[RandomThoughts]

1. What did the monk write in the prayer book n/t

[HysteryDiagnosis]

2. He was writing a prayer to help him get an A on his

calculus test.

[RagAss]

3. A prayer to accompany the burning of non-belivers at the stake, no doubt.

[DavidDvorkin]

5. Mystical nonsense, no doubt.

[Ian David]

4. If not for Religion, we'd be exploring the galaxy by now.

[eppur_se_muova]

6. Get ye to the Greatest Page! nt

[NNadir]

7. Thank you so much for this! I had no idea this was happening. I always thought

that Archimedes was approaching calculus, but this is delicious proof.

[bleever]

8. Fascinating.

Thanks for posting this.