Archimedes Palimpsest
I am a member of the imaging team that is helping scholars read the
original text in the Archimedes
Palimpsest, which is a 10th-century manuscript containing the
oldest copies
of seven of Archimedes' treatises. Included among these treatises is
the only known copy of "The
Method of Mechanical Theorems," where Archimedes described his use
of physical analogues to proving mathematical hypotheses.
The original manuscript was transcribed on pages of parchment
(treated animal skin) that were approximately the size of standard
notebook paper. The pages were bound into a book and kept in a library
in Constantinople (now Istanbul, Turkey). In those days,
parchment writing materials were so valuable that they were commonly
reused when the book was considered "out of date" or if the subject was
deemed inappropriate.
The book was disbound and erased in the 12th century, probably
during one of the Crusades. The pages were torn in half and rebound as
a smaller book. The pages were overwritten with the text of a
Christian prayer book, the Euchologion. Such overwritten
manuscripts are called palimpsests, from the Greek word palimpsesto ("scraped again").
The book spent the next 700 years at various religious shrines in the near east. Its existence first became known to western civilization in the middle 1800s, and was studied extensively by Heiberg in 1906. The book then disappeared again and was feared lost until it resurfaced in the late 1990s. It was sold at auction by Christies in 1998 to an anonymous American collector, who has made the book available for study. An international team of scholars, conservators, and imaging scientists is currently studying the Palimpsest to recover the original writing.
The investigation and significance of the Archimedes Palimpsest is
is the subject of the program
"Infinite Secrets"
broadcast by PBS on NOVA on
30 September 2003.
Additional information
is available at the website of the Walters
Art Museum, the cover story in the London
Sunday Times Magazine of 17 June 2001, the cover story in Physics
Today, June, 2001, an ABC
News Report (20 October 2000). The work was selected as one of the
imaging "solutions of the year" by Advanced Imaging magazine in
January, 2003.
K-12 Activity based on the
Archimedes Palimpsest
Diane Kucharczyk, formerly an undergraduate student at the Chester
F.
Carlson Center for Imaging Science, and Russell Knox, a student at
Brighton High School, NY, have developed a K-12 classroom activity
based on our work to extract text from the Archimedes Palimpsest. This
is available as an HTML Powerpoint file.
The Stomachion
This treatise in the
Archimedes Palimpsest had been thought to describe a game similar to
"Tangrams". Reviel Netz of Stanford University has suggested that the
Stomachion really is a study in geometrical "combinatorics", which is
the study of the number of combinations of shapes that produces a
specific result. This work was reported in the New York Times of
December 14, 2003.