Archimedes Manuscript Recovered After Centuries

In the 13th century, a Byzantine monk took an old manuscript written by Greek mathematician Archimedes, scraped away its text, and reused the parchment to copy a book of Christian prayers. Centuries later, scientists and historians discovered that the erased writing included the previously unknown treatise The Method, in which Archimedes used ideas that anticipated key principles of calculus nearly 2,000 years before Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Modern imaging techniques recovered much of the hidden text.

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