Item Condition: Collectible; Very Good
Sticker on dust cover. Book in very good condition.
On 29 COctober 1998 the frot page of
the New York Times reported that an
extremely ugly, unprepossessing book had
juse been sold at Christie's New York for
$2,000,000. It appeared to be the batered
prayer book of a medieval priest, charred
by fire, doused with water and devoured by
mould. Yet underneath the prayers, barely
visible below the stains and the soot, lay
hidden he oldest surviving manuscript of
the ancient world's greatesE mathematician,
Archimedes of Syracuse.
This is the true story of the greatest scientific
codex extant today: the Archimedes
Palimpsest. Over a thousand years old, this
codex survived against all odds. After i was
written, it was erased, written over again,
damaged, and left to sit on the shelves of
an ancient monastery. The codex travelled
through crusades and world wars, from east
to west and overseas. Discovered in 1906, it
was studied briefly and lost again for nearly
a century before it resurfaced at auction in
1998. Only now -thanks to ultra-modern
imaging techniques-are its hidden contents
finally being brought to light with surprising
results that will fundamentally change our
understanding of the history of science.
Archimedes, it turns out, had reason to
shout Eureka!' in his bath more times than
we thought.
Part detective work and part adventure,
part romance and part science, this story
is like no other. William Noel and Reviel
Netz, who have been studying the book
since its rediscovery in 1998, tell the tale,
alternating between the history of the book
and the history-changing science revealed
in its pages.
The Archimedes Codex
is an engrossing scholarly detective story,
rich in detail as more and more evidence is revealed.
OWEN GINGERICH, PROFESSOR EMERITUS OF ASTRONOMY AND
HisTORY OF SCIENCE, HARVARD-SMITHSONIAN CENTER FOR ASTROPHYSICS
I think that I have never been more spectacularly wrong
than I was with the Archimedes codex. When I saw it first
in the r98os, I valued it at less than a twentieth of what it
made at auction in 1998, and now, after the wvork of Revie
Netz and William Noel and their colleagues, the codex
is clearly infinitely more important still.
CHRISTOPHER DE HAMEL, DEPARTMENT OF WESTERN MEDIEVAL
AND ORIENTAL MANUSCRIPTS AND MINIATURES AT
SOTHEBY'S 1975-2000