Monks Erased an Archimedes Manuscript, and Science May Have Lost Centuries

In 1906, Danish philologist Johan Ludvig Heiberg spotted faint traces of Archimedes beneath a medieval prayer book, a palimpsest created after monks recycled the parchment. Modern multispectral imaging using ultraviolet, infrared, and X-rays later recovered “The Method of Mechanical Theorems,” showing Archimedes developed mathematical ideas roughly 1,800 years before Newton and Leibniz. A prayer book […]