The Archimedes Codex: Revealing The Secrets Of The World's Greatest Pali

This is the thinking man's da Vinci Code.This book has enough seriously hard math-geometry to knock out a horse... No- actually, Gulliver said horses are actually smarter than us... so maybe : a Rhino. They look a bit dumb.If you suffer from insomnia, this book could also be for you. Fascinating insights into the fabled Archimedes "First-Mind", whose talent was actually visual (his father was a a renowned artist, apparently- who collaborated with a Jewish intellectual (also apparently rare in that era). Visuals were the key to the key subject of analysis - Math moved from pictures to symbolic equations a lot later... like the 18th and 19th centuries!I will never look at those well-connected upper-class folks who spend all day snoozing in the hidden rear offices of a museum with condescension again.... the authors of this tome certainly know their science and maths AND are able to make it accessible to a dope like me. Congratulations.There are also parts that read a little like a journal with endless facts that relate the intricacies of the project. Not sure that it could not have been reduced. Some of that though - in the book's defence- did turn into informative science and history if you persisted...To para-quote Dr Suess:"The diagrams were complex and my smarts aren't that great...I felt my brain grew 4 sizes by page two-eighty-eight!".Yours might too.

Archimedes a fascinating read . I love this book . It's flows nicely and is well written. Good value , arrived as described.

The Archimedes Codex is the story of one of the few remaining documents containing the work of the Sicilian thinker Archimedes. It is the story of the book itself and its convoluted history. Without giving much away, the codex is a palimpsest. This is a book on parchment that has had the original writing scraped off and the material refolded and written on again with new text, in this case a mediaeval prayerbook. It explains how conservation work is done and then explores the very latest in imaging technology. But most important of all it explores Archimedes' ideas and physics and mathematics. This book should be read by anyone who wants to know about the history of thought, mathematics or physics, who is interested in modern imaging techniques, who studies ancient thinkers or who enjoys a story of human endeavour in the face of a complex and ever-changing task.It is also a lesson to the very rich about how they might better use their money. The un-named buyer of the book was one such, but being a man of perception and taste, he gave the authors what was in effect a blank cheque to discover what they could from it. In effect he was a patron in the best ancient tradition. By his foresight and generosity we now have access to the ideas in one of the most important books in human history. Because it was a non-commercial venture, the images and other data that were created are available free on the website at [...]In different hands this story could have been dull. However, in a chatty but rigorous style, the authors tell the story of the purchase of the codex, its disbinding and experimental imaging and the discoveries that were made, mostly in the sequence that they happened. They get across their own feelings of joy and frustration, and how their preconceptions were proved wrong in striking and exciting ways. It is a joy to read about some of the greatest minds in their respective fields giving their spare time and their great ingenuity over a period of years to probe the ideas and mind of a man whom the authors assert was the greatest scientist of all time. Their excitement and other emotions ooze from the pages.I have taught physics for much of my life. This book showed me how ignorant I was in this field. I used to say to my students that much of early 'modern' scientific study was 'merely' the restatement and examination of earlier works in Greek. I now know not only that these original thinkers were much more advanced than I, and even the authors of this book, thought, but that Archimedes' work in particular was used directly by Galileo, Newton and others. Indeed one great irony, literally as well as metaphorically as the reader will discover, was that Archimedes' very ideas were used in this study to produce readable images and to decode them.

Fascinating account of finding and reconstructing Archimedes original work, which until I heard of this I didn't know was lost. I should have paid more attention at school.

Exciting to learn that even now after 500 years after the Renaissance there still remains a lot to discover about Greek writers such as Archimedes! Amazing!