![The Archimedes Codex](/jacket/500x500/9780306815805.jpg)
The Archimedes Codex How a Medieval Prayer Book Is Revealing the True Genius of Antiquity's Greatest Scientist
1st Da Capo Press Edition
Hardback (23 Oct 2007)
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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.
Book information
ISBN: | 9780306815805 |
Publisher: | Da Capo Press |
Imprint: | Da Capo Press |
Pub date: | 23 Oct 2007 |
Edition: | 1st Da Capo Press Edition |
DEWEY: | 532.25 |
DEWEY edition: | 22 |
Language: | English |
Number of pages: | 352 |
Weight: | 594g |
Height: | 229mm |
Width: | 153mm |
Spine width: | 28mm |