Archimedes Palimpsest
[1] The first version of the compilation is believed to have been produced by Isidore of Miletus, the architect of the geometrically complex Hagia Sophia cathedral in Constantinople, sometime around AD 530.
[2] The copy found in the palimpsest was created from this original, also in Constantinople, during the Macedonian Renaissance (c. AD 950), a time when mathematics in the capital was being revived by the former Greek Orthodox bishop of Thessaloniki Leo the Geometer, a cousin of the Patriarch.
[8] A Western businessman concealed the book for over 70 years, and at some point forged pictures were painted on top of some of the text to increase resale value.
[10][11][12] Archimedes lived in the 3rd century BC and wrote his proofs as letters in Doric Greek addressed to contemporaries, including scholars at the Great Library of Alexandria.
These letters were first compiled into a comprehensive text by Isidorus of Miletus, the architect of the Hagia Sophia patriarchal church, sometime around AD 530 in the then Byzantine Greek capital city of Constantinople.
At some point before 1840 the palimpsest was brought back by the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem to its library (the Metochion of the Holy Sepulcher) in Constantinople.
In 1899, the Greek scholar Papadopoulos-Kerameus produced a catalog of the library's manuscripts and included a transcription of several lines of the partially visible underlying text.
Heiberg was permitted by the Greek Orthodox Church to take careful photographs of the palimpsest's pages, and from these he produced transcriptions, published between 1910 and 1915, in a complete works of Archimedes.
In addition, after its disappearance from the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate's library, a forger added copies of medieval evangelical portraits in gold leaf onto four pages in the book in order to increase its sales value, further damaging the text.
[13] These forged gold leaf portraits nearly obliterated the text underneath them, and x-ray fluorescence imaging at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center would later be required to reveal it.
[8] The ownership of the palimpsest was immediately contested in federal court in New York in the case of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem v. Christie's, Inc.
Judge Kimba Wood decided in favor of Christie's Auction House on laches grounds, and the palimpsest was bought for $2 million by an anonymous American buyer.
[9] At the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, the palimpsest was the subject of an extensive imaging study from 1999 to 2008, and conservation (as it had suffered considerably from mold while in Sirieix's cellar).
The target audiences for the digitisation are Greek scholars, math historians, people building applications, libraries, archives, and scientists interested in the production of the images.
Dr. Reviel Netz of Stanford University and Nigel Wilson have produced a diplomatic transcription of the text, filling in gaps in Heiberg's account with these images.
The resulting light beam has characteristics that make it ideal for revealing the intricate architecture and utility of many kinds of matter—in this case, the previously hidden work of one of the founding fathers of all science.
Most of this text was recovered in early 2009 by applying principal component analysis to the three color bands (red, green, and blue) of fluorescent light generated by ultraviolet illumination.
But then something even more extraordinary happened.This referred to the previous discovery of a text by Hypereides, an Athenian politician from the fourth century BC, which has also been found within the palimpsest.
Using this method, Archimedes was able to solve several problems now treated by integral calculus, which was given its modern form in the seventeenth century by Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz.
In Heiberg's time, much attention was paid to Archimedes' brilliant use of indivisibles to solve problems about areas, volumes, and centers of gravity.
Reviel Netz of Stanford University has argued that Archimedes discussed the number of ways to solve the puzzle, that is, to put the pieces back into their box.
The Codex board can be found as an extension of Socrates' argument in a seven-by-seven-square grid, suggesting an iterative construction of the side-diameter numbers that give rational approximations to the square root of two.
