The Archimedes Codex
Tina
For a mathematics enthusiast, my arsenal of math-related books is sorely lacking. I envy the bookshelves of my friends (most of them live and breathe mathematics), who have copies of A History of Pi, Fermat’s Enigma, and the like. Half of my bookshelf, on the other hand, is filled with textbooks I am using for my graduate classes, not the ones I would actually pick up for a bit of light reading.
Now that my classes are over and I have nothing to do, it’s time to upgrade my bookshelf. I randomly picked this up at Fully Booked. What do you know, a book dedicated to Archimedes of Syracuse, the most accomplished mathematician of his time! It was written by Willam Noel, Curator of Manuscripts and Rare Books at the Walters Art Museum, and Reviel Netz, Professor of Ancient Science at Stanford University. This book tells the story of their attempts to restore the Archimedes Palimpsest, containing treatises of Archimedes. They also have a website for the project itself.
I should say, I salute the team restoring this manuscript. I can sympathize with the authors regarding the state in which they found the manuscript. Why, they almost erased Archimedes’ works to oblivion! I wanted to kill the scribe who scraped the parchment and turned the manuscript into a prayer book. (Figuratively, of course. The scribe who did this is already dead.) A few pages even had forgeries painted over the entire page! It seemed impossible to retrieve Archimedes’ text, but somehow they did it. All I can say is, wow.
I was fascinated with the techniques they employed to read the Archimedian text underneath the forgeries and the prayer text. I know enough multivariate analysis to understand the concept behind principal component analysis, the method they used to differentiate between the prayer text and the Archimedian text. Now, I am regretting that my notes in Image Processing are scattered somewhere in my drawers.
Of course, the math enthusiast in me followed the proofs of Archimedes as presented in this book. And I have to admit, I was surprised with his arguments. Archimedes could have easily formalized Calculus during his time! He was just too engrossed with his thought experiments, and that’s why the credit goes to Newton and Leibniz for developing Calculus. Makes you wonder how far we could have gone if Calculus was developed during the time of the Greeks. Ahaha.
But my favorite part of this book was their discovery about Stomachion. I used to own puzzles similar to this one, and I’ve yet to complete all of the figures that could be made on these pieces. I was just as surprised as the author was when they realized the combinatorics behind the game Stomachion. I have little patience for combinatorics, and I was just amazed when they figured out that there are 17,152 ways of arranging the pieces of the Stomachion to form a square. Wonder how did they come up with that number? (Without cheating, of course.)
Reading this book made me realize just how influential Archimedes is in the development of Mathematics. Thank God that some of his work survived. Good luck to the members of the Archimedes Palimpsest Project. And many thanks to the owner of the manuscript, for making all of this possible.
Posted on: Tuesday, November 18, 2008 at 10:16 am 
Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Tina, nice article by a person who can appreciate the work done by Netz and the rest of competent scientists who added their efforts to reading the Archimedes text under the worthless Euchologion.
I share your feelings about the scribe Myronas and the more modern French forgers and …
But I disagree with the use of the term “thought experiment” in the phrase “He was just too engrossed with his thought experiments”.
“thought experiment” is the English version of the German term “gedanken experiment”. An experiment that is not carried out but it is only discussed and usually leads to refuting an assertion/theory or leads to a paradox. The very first and almost typical is the Archytas gedanken experiment about the finiteness of the Universe.
On the contrary Archimedes was too engrossed in actual experiments. And most of his work is inspired by practical problems. Archimedes is the greatest engineer not just of his time but EVER.
They used to say that Archimedes, Newton and Gauss were the best three mathematicians through the ages. After reading his palimpsest it is safe to put above the other two, not only as the first giant but simply as the taller of the three giants.
By the way, did you know that the Antikythera mechanism is directly related to Archimedes?
Thanks for the article!
November 26th, 2008 at 7:51 pmA retired (re-tyred) mathematician
Very usefull post.
December 18th, 2008 at 8:43 amThanks.
P.S. I like your writing style.
First of all congratulation for such a great site. I learned a lot reading article here today. I will make sure i visit this site once a day so i can learn more.
December 18th, 2008 at 7:37 pmSiRaQ719iuKXx
January 7th, 2009 at 2:19 pm