The Archimedes Codex: How a medieval prayer book is revealing the true genius of antiquity's greatest scientist

This is a fascinating book, especially if you like history, old books, technology, and Greek mathematics. I found the story to be incredibly interesting, but the book itself seems to be very poorly organized. Every other chapter is written by one of the authors and they each have very different

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styles. Each chapter feels like a paper or article more than a chapter in a highly organized book. Still very good read though.

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This is a fine random history that details the life, death and resurrection of the lost writings of Archimedes, a thinker far, far ahead of his time. He was on the cusp of mathematical theories that did not come to fruition until literally 1800 or more years after his death. The Archimedes Codex is

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almost two books in one, alternating chapters between the two authors. Noel is a mucketymuck at the Walters Art Museum where the restoration of an ancient palimpsest was done and Netz is an expert on ancient Greek mathematics and geometry who was brought in to decipher the text and diagrams.
In a nutshell, the palimpsest was originally a manuscript of a copy (in Greek) of several works of Archimedes, later the ink was scraped off, the pages rotated ninety degrees and scribed over with medieval prayers. That, by the way, is the definition of a palimpsest. There is historical investigation about the life story of the manuscript through the ages, few chapters about the life of Archimedes, the purchase of the actual codex at auction, some ingenious geometric proofs, a bit about the fundamental differences between Greek math and current math, and some fairly technical information about imaging methods used to recover the scraped off text, like using an X-ray scanner to atomically reconstruct the constituents of the text by locating the iron in the ancient ink. All in all a very nice book.

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A fascinating book,although a bit hard going at times.To fully appreciate this book a knowledge of mathematics is required,but it is still interesting to see how modern technology can reveal so much hidden text on such an ancient artifact.

This book is about a palimpsest containing among other things some works by Archimedes otherwise known only from later translations. And I found it enthralling: the effort to see by thought into a vanished word--the mysterious patron--the worlds of Ancient Sicily and Medieval Byzantium--the sheer

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despairing labour randomly rewarded-- the description of Archimedes' style--and of his work all held me fast.

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This is a fascinating book, but it is very poorly written and edited.

In 1998 a battered manuscript was won at auction for two million dollars by an anonymous buyer. It was a palimpsest – a book that was made from the pages stripped from earlier works where the earlier words were scrapped off and a new text was written over it. This was common practice in medieval

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times when paper was a valuable commodity. The book that was purchased was a simple thirteenth-century payer book. However, that is not what made the book valuable. The real value was the faint impressions of the much older tenth-century writing buried underneath it. It was the earliest writing of perhaps the greatest mathematicians in history – Archimedes.

Co-written by Reviel Netz – a Professor of Classics at Stanford University, and William Noel – the Curator of Manuscripts at the Walters Art Museum, The Archimedes Codex chronicles the ongoing, decade-long project to discover just how deep the knowledge of Archimedes went. Archimedes was an ancient mathematician born nearly 300 years before the birth of Christ who made discoveries about the nature of mathematics that are only now being fully understood – 2,000 years after Archimedes first wrote them down.

The magic of the Archimedes Codex is that there is no other copy of these specific writings in existence. In fact, even now after ten years of investigation of the text, including the use of brand new technologies never before used for such purposes, they are still discovering more about the extent of Archimedes’ genius.

The writing in The Archimedes Codex itself is nothing spectacular, but it is good enough to get the points across. They do a good job of explaining the importance of the mathematical principles in a way that most people can at least appreciate, even if almost nobody can completely understand it. Even so, there are times when it becomes a really dry read, even for me – and I’m an accountant! What is far more interesting is the preservation and recovery process of the book itself. The simple fact that the book survived this long is amazing. The book is literally falling apart and all of the scientists involved are taking monumental steps to do as little damage to it as they can. The lengths that they have gone to in order to extract the impressions of words buried in the paper are fascinating. Already, they have discovered that Archimedes knew even more about modern mathematical principles then was originally believed.

The book itself is not a great piece of writing, but the subject is fascinating to learn about. In addition, this should be a cautionary tale of why books should never, ever be destroyed and why preserving ancient manuscripts by digitizing them doesn’t necessarily preserve everything we might someday learn from the book itself. For that reason alone, this is a good book for book lovers and collectors to experience. It made for interesting reading on a truly unique piece of history.

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This book is the portuguese translation of the english original The Archimedes Codex. The wonderful tale of the (re)discovery of the Archimedes Palimpsest, of the research that allowed us to read Archimedes' text, and of what we have learned (so far) from it. The book intersperses chapters about

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the book as an object (its history as well as the techniques for its restauration and study) with chapters about Archimedes and his mathematics. Of course the part about the history of the book is jaw dropping, but those chapters concerning Archimedes' mathematics, both of what was already known and of those parts unique to the Palimpsest (the actual infinity in the Method, and the combinatorics in the Stomachion) are truly great. Our mind really boggles when thinking either about the geniality of Archimedes' thought in the 3rd century BCE, the incredibly hasards this manuscript (a copy probably written twelve centuries after his death) has suffered, and the extraordinary refinement of the late 20th century technology that was needed in order to recover the original text and to have in from of us the words written twenty three centuries ago by one of the most genial minds that has ever lived.

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It is rare that “lost” writings of ancient scientists and philosophers are discovered today. But this is exactly what happened in 1998 when a medieval prayer book was offered for sale. It was a codex (a manuscript book) with several missing pages and several forged pictures, but the parchment

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reused by the medieval scribe contained texts from Archimedes and other ancient scholars. It became clear that this was a manuscript that went missing in the mid 20th century but had been studied earlier in the century by the noted Archimedes scholar Heiberg.

This sets the stage for the book, the joint efforts of Reviel Netz, a scholar of ancient science, and William Noel, curator of the Walters Art Museum. They traded chapters with Dr. Netz writing about the Archimedes and his math and science and Dr. Noel writing about the book and its challenges, the building of the team to read the underlying palimpsest (and in the case of the forgeries, the prayer book text), and discovering the other lost writings including some pages of Hyperides, a Greek orator.

The science and math was challenging to understand, especially the math notation. Once I could equate the notation of Archimedes with one that I knew and understood, the reading became much easier. The science of imaging was one of the most interesting sections of Dr. Noel’s presentation. The images were clearly presented in the text with 16 pages of color plates and numerous black and white images. The authors also provided a website for the Archimedes project that contains images as well text and video. The bibliography is extensive and includes much supplemental reading.

For anyone interested in manuscripts, codices, palimpsests, math and the beginning of modern science, this book is a great introduction.

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