The Archimedes Codex : How a Medieval Prayer Book Is Revealing the True Genius of Antiquity's Greatest Scientist

At a Christie's auction in October 1998, a battered medieval manuscript sold for two million dollars to an anonymous bidder, who then turned it over to the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore for further study. The manuscript was a palimpsest-a book made from an earlier codex whose script had been scraped off and the pages used again. Behind the script of the thirteenth-century monk's prayer book, the palimpsest revealed the faint writing of a much older, tenth-century manuscript. Part archaeological detective story, part science, and part history, The Archimedes Codex tells the extraordinary story of this lost manuscript, from its tenth-century creation in Constantinople to the auction block at Christie's, and how a team of scholars used the latest imaging technology to reveal and decipher the original text. What they found was the earliest surviving manuscript by Archimedes (287 b.c.-212 b.c.), the greatest mathematician of antiquity-a manuscript that revealed, for the first time, the full range of his mathematical genius, which was two thousand years ahead of modern science. Table of Figures; Title Page; Dedication; Preface; 1 -- Archimedes in America; Archimedes for Sale; Help for Archimedes; 2 -- Archimedes in Syracuse; Who Was Archimedes?; Science before Science; Squaring Circles; Imaginary Dialogues; Squaring the Parabola; Beyond Potential Infinity; Proofs and Physics; Puzzles and Numbers; Death and Afterlife; 3 -- The Great Race, Part 1 Before the Palimpsest; A Letter Is Written; In the Library; A Change of Medium; The Gathering Storm; Into the Ark; The Byzantine Renaissance; The ABC of Archimedes; Codex C; 4 -- Visual Science; Before Equations.;The extraordinary story of the discovery of lost works by Archimedes beneath the pages of a medieval prayer book, and the amazing secrets they reveal.