Saturday, January 24, 2009

Recently discovered Archimedes text that seems to describe calculus was written over with Christian prayers

A Prayer For Archimedes: "The owners wondered if the strange book might have some value, so they took it to Christie's Auction House of London. And in 1998, Christie's auctioned it off—for two million dollars.

For this was not just a prayer book. The faint Greek inscriptions and accompanying diagrams were, in fact, the only surviving copies of several works by the great Greek mathematician Archimedes."

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