Infinite Powers: How Calculus Reveals the Secrets of the Universe

by Steven H. Strogatz

As always, the ravages of time were cruel. Kingdoms fell and libraries were burned. Manuscripts decayed. Not a single copy of the Method was known to have survived the Middle Ages. Although Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo, Newton, and other geniuses of the Renaissance and the scientific revolution pored over what was left of Archimedes’s treatises, they never had a chance to read the Method. It was thought to be irretrievably lost. And then, miraculously, it was found. In October 1998 a battered medieval prayer book came up for auction at Christie’s and sold to an anonymous private collector for $2.2 million. Barely visible under its Latin prayers lay faint geometrical diagrams and mathematical text written in tenth-century Greek. The book is a palimpsest; in the thirteenth century, its parchment folios had been washed and scraped clean of the original Greek and overwritten with Latin liturgical text. Fortunately, the Greek was not completely obliterated. It contains the only surviving copy of Archimedes’s Method. The Archimedes Palimpsest, as it is now known, first came to light in 1899 in a Greek Orthodox library in Constantinople. It spent the Renaissance and the scientific revolution undetected in a prayer book in the monastery of St. Sabas near Bethlehem. It now lives in the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, where it has been lovingly restored and examined using the latest imaging technology.