The Archimedes Codex: Revealing The Secrets Of The World's Greate

The Archimedes Codex Revealing The Secrets Of The World's Greatest Palimpsest
Reviel Netz (Autor), William Noel (Autor)
Gebundene Ausgabe mit Schutzumschlag: 320 Seiten - Verlag: Weidenfeld & Nicolson (2007) - Sprache: Englisch - Größe und/oder Gewicht: 24,2 x 16,6 x 3,2 cm

The story of the amazing discovery of Archimedes' lost works
At a Christie's auction in October 1998, a battered medieval manuscript sold for two million dollars to an anonymous bidder, who then turned it over to the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore for further study. The manuscript was a palimpsest-a book made from an earlier codex whose script had been scraped off and the pages used again. Behind the script of the thirteenth-century monk's prayer book, the palimpsest revealed the faint writing of a much older, tenth-century manuscript. Part archaeological detective story, part science, and part history, The Archimedes Codex tells the extraordinary story of this lost manuscript, from its tenth-century creation in Constantinople to the auction block at Christie's, and how a team of scholars used the latest imaging technology to reveal and decipher the original text. What they found was the earliest surviving manuscript by Archimedes (287 b.c.-212 b.c.), the greatest mathematician of antiquity-a manuscript that revealed, for the first time, the full range of his mathematical genius, which was two thousand years ahead of modern science.
Drawings and writings by Archimedes, previously thought to have been destroyed, have been uncovered beneath the pages of a 13th-century monk's prayer book. These hidden texts, slowly being retrieved and deciphered by scientists, show that Archimedes' thinking (2,200 years ago) was even ahead of Isaac Newton in the 17th century.
Archimedes discovered the value of Pi, he developed the theory of specific gravity and made steps towards the development of calculus. Everything we know about him comes from three manuscripts, two of which have disappeared. The third, currently in the Walters Art Museum, is a palimpsest - the text has been scraped off, the book taken apart and its parchment re-used, in this case as a prayer book. William Noel, the project director, and Reviel Netz, a historian of ancient mathematics, tell the enthralling story of the survival of that prayer book from 1229 to the present, and examine the process of recovering the invaluable text underneath as well as investigating into why that text is so important.
Pressestimmen
'the incredible story of the codex itself provides a page-turner as addictive as anything by Dan Brown.' TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT 'Part detective-story, part scientific history, this tells how modern scientific techniques have allowed our understanding and appreciation of Archimedes to blossom over the past decade.' GOOD BOOK GUIDE
Über den Autor und weitere Mitwirkende
Reviel Netz is Professor of Ancient Science at Stanford University, a leading authority on Archimedes, and editor of the Archimedes Palimpsest.
William Noel is Curator of Manuscripts and Rare Books at the Walters Art Museum and Director of the Archimedes Palimpsest Project.
*Archimedes von Syrakus*
Zu Zeiten, da Gold täglich neue Höchststände erreicht, erinnert man sich vielleicht an Archimedes. Er soll, so die Überlieferung, 'Heureka' gerufen haben, als das Wasser aus seiner Badewanne spritzte, in die er sich hineinplumpsen ließ. Er habe in diesem Augenblick die Idee gehabt, wie man prüfen könnte, ob eine Krone aus echtem Gold besteht oder nicht (die Lösung steht in Schulbüchern im Kapitel über das spezifischen Gewicht). Nette Geschichte, aber wahrscheinlich nicht wahr. Richtig ist, dass er sich ausführlich mit schwimmenden Körpern beschäftigte. Dass man aus dem Volumen des übergelaufenen Wassers das Volumen des eintauchenden Körpers messen kann ist so trivial, dass er es in seiner Abhandlung "Über schwimmende Körper" nicht einmal erwähnt hat. Die Leistung Archimedes' bestand darin, dass er die Mathematik des Unendlichen beg