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Who identified the Archimedes Palimpsest in Istanbul in 1906?
Heiberg, working at the library of the Metochion of the Holy Sepulchre in Istanbul, identified the faint mathematical underwriting beneath a 13th-century Greek prayer book as Archimedes — including the only surviving copy of the *Method of Mechanical Theorems*. The manuscript later disappeared, resurfaced at Christie's in 1998, and was recovered by multispectral imaging at the Walters Art Museum.
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The Prayer Book That Was a Math Textbook In 1906 a Danish scholar in Istanbul opened a medieval Greek prayer book and noticed faint mathematics underneath the prayers. It was Archimedes.
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- 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?
- 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?