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

About this book

At a Christies 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 monks 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 Christies 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.