Eureka, Archimedes!

Ok, so this isn't actually a book review, but it's about a book, so it still counts. I seem to be celebrating having finished with my first round of marking by watching a documentary about the history of mathematics, but if I didn't love this stuff I wouldn't do it for a living. I'm watching Nova: Infinite Secrets, which is about a lost Archimedes manuscript in which he appears to have been working with infinities. In particular, he appears to have developed techniques very similar to those of integral calculus, almost 2000 years before its credited invention by Newton and Leibniz. Integral calculus is central to applied mathematics and engineering - so it's not just fun, kids, it's science!

The documentary is about the Archimedes Palimpsest, which is a manuscript by Archimedes which had since been cleaned off and reused as a prayer book, with the original text only barely visible. It talks about how the palimpsest was rediscovered by historians and is being restored and redeciphered by scholars from various fields. It's an incredibly difficult process, since it involves an attempt to read a text (already very old) which has since been overwritten and has had to weather plenty of abuse.

The bonus in the documentary for me is that one of the scholars involved is a Stanford Classics prof (a historian of ancient mathematics), whose seminar in Plato's Philosophy of Math was one of the main things which kicked me into history and philosophy of mathematics in the first place. The comments he gave me on what became the second chapter of my dissertation were very, very useful. He's interviewed in the documentary about the significance of the mathematical work in the palimpsest, and gives a very articulate and accessible account.

Highly recommended, and of both historical and mathematical interest! (Who better for a classicist and a logician jointly to celebrate than Archimedes?)