About the Book

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.

Product Details

Media: Hardcover Book, 313 pages

Language: English

Publisher: Da Capo Press (Oct. 31st, 2007)

ISBN-10: 030681580X

ISBN-13: 9780306815805

Dimensions: 6.36 x 9.26 x 1.12 inches

Shipping Weight: 1.31 lbs

• Categories: Ancient Greece History History Science History Mathematics and Philosophy Mathematics