WHEN some 12th-century monks in Constantinople needed to write a prayer book,
they found an old parchment and scraped it clean. Tragically, they scraped off
seven treatises by Archimedes, the 3rd century BC Greek mathematician. The
treatises had been transcribed by monks two hundred years earlier.
But now restoration experts at the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore,
Maryland, has commissioned a team from nearby Johns Hopkins University and the
Rochester Institute of Technology to transcribe the complete work, including
lines that couldn’t be read before. The “Archimedes Palimpsest” was rediscovered
in 1907 and some of it was painstakingly transcribed with…
