More about the book
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, <i>The Archimedes Codex</i> 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.
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The Archimedes Codex, Reviel Netz, William Noel
- Language
- Released
- 2007
- product-detail.submit-box.info.binding
- (Hardcover),
- Book condition
- Very Good
- Price
- €11.49
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- Title
- The Archimedes Codex
- Subtitle
- How a Medieval Prayer Book Is Revealing the True Genius of Antiquity's Greatest Scientist
- Language
- English
- Authors
- Reviel Netz, William Noel
- Publisher
- Da Capo Press
- Released
- 2007
- Format
- Hardcover
- Pages
- 352
- ISBN10
- 030681580X
- ISBN13
- 9780306815805
- Series
- Description
- 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, <i>The Archimedes Codex</i> 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.