Restoring Genius - Discovering lost works of Archimedes - Part 2

Archimedes was one of the most brilliant people ever, on a par with
Einstein and Newton. Yet very little of what he wrote still exists
because of the passage of time, and because many copies of his
works were erased and the cleaned pages were used again. One of
those written-over works (called a palimpsest) has resurfaced, and
advanced digital imaging techniques using statistics and linear
algebra have revealed his previously unknown discoveries in
combinatorics and calculus. This leads to a question that would
stump even Archimedes: How much further would mathematics and
science have progressed had these discoveries not been erased? One
of the most dramatic revelations of Archimedes. work was done using
X-ray fluorescence. A painting, forged in the 1940s by one of the
book.s former owners, obscured the original text, but X-rays
penetrated the painting and highlighted the iron in the ancient
ink, revealing a page of Archimedes. treatise The Method of
Mechanical Theorems. The entire process of uncovering this and his
other ideas is made possible by modern mathematics and physics,
which are built on his discoveries and techniques. This completion
of a circle of progress is entirely appropriate since one of
Archimedes. accomplishments that wasn.t lost is his approximation
of pi. For More Information: The Archimedes Codex, Reviel Netz and
William Noel, 2007.