The Archimedes Codex

DEGREESDDrawings and writings by Archimedes, previously thought to havebeen destroyed, have been uncovered beneath the pages of a 13th-century monk's prayer book. These hidden texts, slowly beingretrieved and deciphered by scientists, show that Archimedes' thinking (2,200 years ago) was even ahead of Isaac Newton in the 17th century. Archimedes discovered the value of Pi, he developedthe theory of specific gravity and made steps towards the development of calculus. Everything we know about him comes from three manuscripts, two of which have disappeared. The third, currently in the Walters Art Museum, is a palimpsest - the text has been scraped off, the book taken apart and its parchment re-used, in this case as a prayer book. William Noel, the projectdirector, and Reviel Netz, a historian of ancient mathematics, tell the enthralling story of the survival of that prayer book from 1229 to the present, and examine the process of recovering the invaluable text underneath as well as investigating into why that text is so important. DEGREESG305p col pls (Weidenfeld and Nicholson 2007) DEGREESg