This website is the companion piece to the PBS NOVA broadcast of "Infinite Secrets," a documentary relating the discovery of the oldest of Archimedes' extant treatises. The treatise was bought at auction, with none knowing that hidden under the 13th Century prayer manuscript was a copy of an Archimedes work. The site details the history of this palimpsest, the efforts undertaken to do imaging and scanning of the badly deteriorated and scraped Archimedes treatise, and the mathematical implications for the find, as the palimpsest indicated that Archimedes was working on the concept of calculating infinity; a precursor, in the minds of the scholars who worked on this project, on the road to the calculus.
posted by Marcus Zillman |
3:52 PM
