Sam Wormley wrote:

Ref: http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20040515/bob9.asp

Glimpses of Genius

Mathematicians and historians piece together
a puzzle that Archimedes pondered

Erica Klarreich

At the start of the 20th century, a Danish mathematical historian named
Johan Ludvig Heiberg made a once-in-a-lifetime find. Tucked away in
the library of a monastery in Istanbul was a medieval parchment
containing copies of the works of the ancient Greek mathematician
Archimedes, including two never-before-seen essays. To mathematicians'
astonishment, one of the new essays contained many of the key ideas of
calculus, a subject supposedly invented two millennia after Archimedes'
time. The essay caused a sensation and landed Heiberg's discovery on the
front page of a 1907 New York Times.

See: http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20040515/bob9.asp

" In the 13th century, monks reused a copy of Archimedes' work by
writing prayer texts (horizontal lines) over the underlying
mathematical text (vertical lines)."

Ah, Christianity - consistent in destroying all things of value.

--
Uncle Al
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/
(Toxic URL! Unsafe for children and most mammals)
"Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" The Net!