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Maybe, but Archimedes does begin the treatise with a series of seven crucial, empirically grounded assumptions about centers of mass and balances, and he consciously employs an idealization that the triangle, a plane figure, has uniformly distributed weight. In describing (very elegantly, I might add) how Archimedes finds the center of mass of a triangle in his On the Equilibrium of Planes, Netz says that Archimedes has told us “without even looking how the world must behave, where a triangle must balance,” and Netz calls it an “act of magic” (page 147).
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Netz also goes on to turn Archimedes into a scientific magician. The Codex Boturini maps the progress of the Aztecs across space and time by using footprints that connect the episodes of their migration. However, if all you knew of Greek mathematics was from Netz and Noel’s book, you might incorrectly conclude that Archimedes discovered the method of exhaustion, conic sections, the notions of infinity and indivisibles, mathematical mechanics, and more. In alternating chapters with Netz, Noel narrates with some verve his own story in learning about the palimpsest he surveys both the document’s history from the origins of the undertext to its sojourn at SLAC at 2006 for advanced imaging and the discovery of works by other ancient Greek authors.Īrchimedes certainly is the central and greatest figure in ancient Greek mathematics and in its revival, which was crucial for the emergence of 16th-and 17th-century mechanics. Netz, professor of classics and philosophy at Stanford University and one of the most creative historians of mathematics of our time, has worked extensively on the palimpsest. Sirius soon finds himself entangled in an interstellar plot to make humanity a cosmic outcast, denying it its place as the newest member of the vast and ancient. Noel is curator of manuscripts at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland, where the owner deposited the palimpsest, and is the director of the Archimedes Palimpsest Project. The codex had several advantages over the roll, or scroll. The earliest type of manuscript in the form of a modern book (i.e., a collection of written pages stitched together along one side), the codex replaced the earlier rolls of papyrus and wax tablets. Reviel Netz and William Noel’s The Archimedes Codex: How a Medieval Prayer Book Is Revealing the True Genius of Antiquity’s Greatest Scientist consists of two personal introductions to the palimpsest, its history, the work in reading it, and its mathematics-especially in recent discoveries (see the article by Netz in Physics Today, codex, manuscript book, especially of Scripture, early literature, or ancient mythological or historical annals.