The Archimedes Palimpsest

Description

The Archimedes Palimpsest is the name given to a Byzantine prayer book that was written over a number of earlier manuscripts, including one that contained two unique works by Archimedes, unquestionably the greatest mathematician of antiquity. Sold at auction in 1998, it has since been the subject of a privately funded project to conserve, image, and transcribe its texts. In this volume the scientists, conservators, classicists, and historians involved in the project discuss in full their techniques and their discoveries. These include new speeches by the classical Athenian orator Hyperides, a lost commentary on Aristotle's Categories from the second or third century AD, and substantial re-readings and reinterpretations of the works by Archimedes. The book discusses the pioneering imaging and post-processing techniques used to reveal the texts, and includes detailed codicological descriptions of all eight manuscripts that constitute the Palimpsest. It will be of interest to manuscript scholars, conservators, classicists, and historians of science.

Reviel Netz is Professor of Classics and Professor of Philosophy, by courtesy, at Stanford University. His books, most published by Cambridge University Press, include The Shaping of Deduction in Greek Mathematics: A Study in Cognitive History (1999, Runciman Award), The Transformation of Early Mediterranean Mathematics: From Problems to Equations (2004) and Ludic Proof: Greek Mathematics and the Alexandrian Aesthetic (2009). He is also engaged in a translation of and commentary on the complete works of Archimedes, the first volume of which, The Two Books on Sphere and Cylinder, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2004. His popular book on the Archimedes Palimpsest Project, The Archimedes Codex (co-authored with William Noel, Neumann Prize), was published in 2007 and has been translated into twenty languages. William Noel is Curator of Manuscripts and Rare Books at The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore and Director of the Archimedes Palimpsest Project. His popular book, The Archimedes Codex (co-authored with Reviel Netz, Neumann Prize), was published in 2007 and has been translated into twenty languages. He is a member of the Faculty of Rare Book School at the University of Virginia and is Adjunct Professor at Johns Hopkins University. Dr Noel received his doctorate from Cambridge University in 1993 and has published widely on European manuscript illumination in the period 800 to 1300 and on the Archimedes Palimpsest. Nigel Wilson is a Fellow of the British Academy and Fellow and Tutor (Emeritus) at Lincoln College, Oxford. He has had long experience of research on Greek manuscripts and editing texts. His works include Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature (with L. D. Reynolds, 3rd edition 1991) and Scholars of Byzantium (revised edition 1996). Natalie Tchernetska is a leading manuscript scholar specialising in Greek palimpsests. Educated in Riga, St Petersburg and Geneva, she conducted research in Rome and Hamburg and completed her doctorate at Cambridge University. In the late 1990s she was one of the first manuscript scholars in the world to venture into the field of digital imaging. In 2002 she discovered and identified the fragments of two speeches of Hyperides in the Archimedes Palimpsest; this discovery radically changed our view of the survival of Hyperides in Byzantium.

'The imminent massive publication of a complete facsimile and transcription will be a huge gift to the study of ancient mathematics.' Alexander Jones, Wall Street Journal 'There is enormous expectation in the scholarly community about the arrival of the first copies of a new book from Cambridge University Press, which contains full color images of the palimpsest, a technical account of how the images were made and complete transcriptions of the texts. It's too early to say whether this will revolutionize our understanding of Greek mathematics, but it will contain new texts thought to have been lost forever by the Greek orator Hyperides and the most complete versions of several works by Archimedes, including two books which exist only in this manuscript. This is the iceberg in full view, a massive tome that took more than a decade to produce, recovering - perhaps as fully as can ever be hoped - texts that miraculously escaped the oblivion of decay and destruction.' The Washington Post