Missing page Archimedes PalimpsestThe oldest surviving copy of the ancient Greek mathematician’s work has been rediscovered at the Museum of Fine Arts in Blois, France. One side of the page, missing for 120 years, contains part of Archimedes’ papers About spheres and cylinderswhile the other was covered by lighting sometime in the 20th century.
this Palimpsest Dating back to 10th century Greece, it contains several written works by Archimedes, parts of which were removed during the Middle Ages to repurpose the parchment for other materials. A researcher at France’s National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) who made the rediscovery said: “This recycling practice was common at the time for such animal skin writing materials and was extremely costly.”
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As noted in reports on the news scientific american“, “Archimedes lived in Syracuse, ancient Greece, around 250 BC. He was one of the world’s greatest thinkers. His theories, experiments and inventions in mathematics, physics and engineering still fascinate scientists to this day. (Legend has it that Archimedes died while doing mathematics – at the hands of Roman soldiers while making calculations in the sand – although this has never been confirmed.)”
As for the missing page, its whereabouts have been unknown since a historian photographed the book in 1906. Archimedes Palimpsest The manuscript is currently in the collection of the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland, and was the focus of a 2011 exhibition. At the time, the museum noted that the manuscript was purchased by an anonymous buyer at Christie’s in 1998 for $2 million and was “considered by many to be the most important scientific manuscript ever sold at auction.”
In the early 2000s, research Archimedes Palimpsest Texts from Archimedes and other literary and philosophical texts can be identified using multispectral imaging. The researchers who rediscovered the missing pages hope to use similar multispectral methods combined with “synchrotron-based X-ray fluorescence analysis” to try to reveal the text of the recovered material, according to France’s National Center for Scientific Research.
“This discovery has reignited interest in re-examining the complete Archimedean Palimpsest using more powerful techniques than those used in the early 2000s, with a view to producing new readings of pages that remained illegible during the original campaign,” CNRS said in a press release.
