02.22.07.1950
I was reading an article in March 07 issue of The Smithsonian that discussed the progressive restoration of the works of Archimedes that had been previously unknown until their discovery in a 10th century copy that has not only deteriorated greatly through the ages, but abused as well.
I’ll start at the beginning…
Archimedes, perhaps the greatest ancient mathematician in our history (whose greatness was not matched until Newton) wrote many treatises on papyrus (which are all lost to time) regarding his work. Scribes had made copies and preserved them at Constantinople until it was sacked and burned by Crusaders in 1204. However, a copy made in the 900s somehow escaped the flames of religious destruction and found itself secretly hiding in a Christian monastery near Bethlehem.
Unfortunately, this book, bound in goatskin and made up of 174 pages of vellum was not spared the destruction of religious desire. In 1229, a Greek priest named Ioannes Myronas (who signed and dated his work on April 29th), was in need of some parchment and “scraped off”, or palimpsested a number of pages of written knowledge from the mind of Archimedes. In its place was written liturgical stuff.
The book was later found in 1906 in a Greek Orthodox monastery back in Constantinople by a Danish scholar named Johan Heiberg. He took some photographs of many pages and published some articles based on what he could decipher. The book disappeared after WWI, again, and apparently had been tampered with (Byzantine-styled illuminations were forged on some pages; perhaps to increase its value) until it resurfaced again in 1998 when it was sold by an anonymous collector in an auction to the United States for $2 million. It now resides at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland where it has undergone extensive study to determine exactly what was originally written.
Of the 174 pages, 14 are of rare commentaries on Aristotle’s treatise on the logic of categorization, and another 10 pages record two previously unknown speeches of Hyperides (an Athenian orator and politician from the fourth century B.C.E.). The treatises contained in the Archimedes Palimpsest are: On the Equilibrium of Planes, On Spirals, The Measurement of the Circle, On the Sphere and the Cylinder, On Floating Bodies, The Method of Mechanical Theorems and Stomachion. However, the most impressive find is in The Method of Mechanical Theorums were Archimedes describes the concept of infinity. The concept of infinity was thought to be too problematic for ancient Greek mathematicians to grasp, but Archimedes managed to grasp it twenty centuries before Newton and Leibniz.
The text in the Archimedes Palimpsest will probably be published for the public in late 2008 or sometime in 2009.
[size=75]The article in question that this post derives its information from is found on page 58 of the March 07 issue of The Smithsonian Magazine: “Reading Between the Lines” by Mary K. Miller.[/size]