Scientific Colloquium
April 4, 2008
WILLIAM NOEL
THE WALTERS ART MUSEUM
"Eureka! The Archimedes Palimpsest"
On 29th April, 1229 AD, a scribe
working in the Holy Land wrote a prayerbook. The parchment he used
contained unique texts from the ancient world. The scribe erased these
texts and wrote over them. Since 1999 an international group of
conservators, scientific imagers, and scholars have been retrieving
these texts. They have trancribed seven treatises of Archimedes, three
of which are unique to this book, and their readings have changed the
history of science. They have also recovered Unique speeches by the
Athenian orator Hyperides, and an early commentary on Aristotle's
Categories. William Noel, the Director of the Project, will present the
results of ten years of research, concentrating on the imaging
techniques used to recover the texts.