Archimedes Palimpsest

The Archimedes Palimpsest^* is a palimpsest on parchment in the form of a codex which originally was a copy of an otherwise unknown work of the ancient mathematician, physicist, and engineer Archimedes of Syracuse and other authors. Archimedes lived in the third century BC, but the copy was made in the 10th century by an anonymous scribe. In the 12th century the codex was unbound and washed, in order that the parchment leaves could be folded in half and reused for a Christian liturgical text. It was a book of nearly 90 pages before being made a palimpsest of 177 pages; the older leaves folded so that each became two leaves of the liturgical book. Fortunately, the erasure was incomplete, and Archimedes' work is now readable using digital processing of ultraviolet, X-ray, and visible light.

In 1906 it was briefly inspected in Constantinople and was published, from photographs, by the Danish philologist Johan Ludvig Heiberg (1854–1928); shortly thereafter it was translated into English by Thomas Heath. Before that it was not widely known among mathematicians, physicists, or historians. It contains the only known copy of "On Floating Bodies" in Greek, and the only copy of "The Method of Mechanical Theorems" and the section of the "Stomachion".

What Archimedes did

Although the only mathematical tools at its author's disposal were what we might now consider secondary-school geometry, Archimedes used those methods with rare brilliance, explicitly using infinitesimals to solve problems that would now be treated by integral calculus, which was independently reinvented in the 17th century by Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz. Among those problems were that of calculating the center of gravity of a solid hemisphere, the center of gravity of a frustum of a circular paraboloid, and the area of a region bounded by a parabola and one of its secant lines. Contrary to exaggerations found in some 20th century calculus textbooks, he did not use anything like Riemann sums, either in the work embodied in this palimpsest or in any of his other works. For explicit details of the method used, see how Archimedes used infinitesimals.

A problem solved exclusively in the Method is the calculation of the volume of a cylindrical wedge, a result that reappears as theorem XVII (schema XIX) of Kepler's Stereometria.

Some pages of the Method remained unused by the author of the Palimpsest and thus they are still—probably forever—lost. Between them, an announced result concerned the volume of the intersection of two cylinders, a figure that Apostol and Mnatsakian have renamed n = 4 Archimedean globe (and the half of it, n = 4 Archimedean dome), whose volume relates to the n-polygonal pyramid. This is amusing because the collaboration on indivisibles between Galileo and Cavalieri—ranging between years 1626 to around 1635—has as a main argument the hull and pyramid of the n = ∞ dome. So in some sense it is true that the Method is only a theorem behind the modern infinitesimal theory.

In Heiberg's time, much attention was paid to Archimedes' brilliant use of infinitesimals to solve problems about areas, volumes, and centers of gravity. Less attention was given to the Stomachion, a problem treated in the Palimpsest that appears to deal with a children's puzzle. Reviel Netz of Stanford University has shown that Archimedes found that the number of ways to solve the puzzle is 17,152. This is perhaps the most sophisticated work in the field of combinatorics in classical antiquity.

The Palimpsest's modern career

From the 1920s, the manuscript lay unknown in the Paris apartment of a collector of manuscripts and his heirs. In 1998 the ownership of the palimpsest was disputed in federal court in New York in the case of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem versus Christie's, Inc. At some time in the distant past, the Archimedes manuscript had lain in the library of Mar Saba, near Jerusalem, a monastery bought by the Patriarchate in 1625. The plaintiff contended that the palimpsest had been stolen from one of its monasteries in the 1920s. Judge Kimba Wood decided in favor of Christie's Auction House on laches grounds, and the palimpsest was bought for $2 million by an anonymous information technology person.

The palimpsest is now at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, where conservation continues (as it had suffered considerably from mould). A more accurate edition of the manuscript, including its drawn geometrical figures, is expected, possibly in 2007.

A team of imaging scientists from the Rochester Institute of Technology and Johns Hopkins University has used computer processing of digital images from various spectral bands, including ultraviolet and visible light, to reveal the Archimedes text. Dr. Reviel Netz ^* of Stanford University has been trying to fill in gaps in Heiberg's account with these images.

Four pages that had been painted over with Byzantine-style religious images, which turned out to be 20th-century forgeries intended to increase the value of the prayer book, rendered the underlying text of Archimedes forever illegible, it appeared. Then, in May 2005, highly focused X-rays produced at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in Menlo Park, California were used to begin deciphering the parts of the 174-page text that have not yet been revealed. The production of x-ray fluorescence was described by Keith Hodgson, director of SSRL. "Synchrotron light is created when electrons traveling near the speed of light take a curved path around a storage ring—emitting electromagnetic light in X-ray through infrared wavelengths. The resulting light beam has characteristics that make it ideal for revealing the intricate architecture and utility of many kinds of matter—in this case, the previously hidden work of one of the founding fathers of all science." ^*.

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Archimedes | History of mathematics | mathematics books | Manuscripts | Ancient Greek works

Palimpsesto de Arquímedes

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What Archimedes did

The Palimpsest's modern career

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