The Archimedes Palimpsest is a 13th-century Greek prayer book whose vellum pages were originally scraped Archimedes manuscripts. Some of the works it preserves — including the *Method of Mechanical Theorems* — exist nowhere else. Who identified the underlying Archimedes text, and when?
Heiberg traveled to the library of the Metochion of the Holy Sepulchre in Istanbul in 1906 after seeing a single photographic reproduction of a few pages of the prayer book. He identified the underwriting as Archimedean within hours, photographed substantial portions of the manuscript, and published the substantive content in 1910. The manuscript disappeared during the First World War, resurfaced at a Christie's auction in 1998, and was bought by a anonymous private collector for $2 million. The collector loaned it to the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, where multispectral imaging recovered substantially more of the underwriting than Heiberg's photographs had captured. Schliemann excavated Troy, not Constantinople libraries. T. L. Heath translated Greek mathematical works but didn't find the palimpsest.
Read the full story →In 1906 a Danish scholar in Istanbul opened a medieval Greek prayer book and noticed faint mathematics underneath the prayers. It was Archimedes.
Related questions
- Who identified the Archimedes Palimpsest in Istanbul in 1906?
- What technique in Archimedes's *Method of Mechanical Theorems* anticipated what later mathematics?
- Archimedes is supposed to have run naked through Syracuse shouting *Eureka!* — 'I have found it!' — after a sudden insight came to him while bathing. What had he figured out?
- Who killed Archimedes during the Roman sack of Syracuse in 212 BC?