Archimedes

From HASTRO-L comes news of the live unveiling of the Archimedes Palimpsest at 4pm PST on August 4, which is midnight onwards GMT, or 1am BST. The press-kit states “Join us at the Exploratorium or online as we watch ancient text revealed and read for the first time in a thousand years!“, which makes them much more honest than me. I’d have made sure my panel of experts knew exactly what was going to be revealed so they could coo appreciatively and say something useful to the webcam.

The press-centre links to several sites on the subject. I’d particularly recommend Reviel Netz’s The Origins of Mathematical Physics: New Light on an Old Question, from Physics Today. He’s a very imaginative thinker. He’s not simply good at mathematics, but can also pose interesting social questions on maths.

One paper he’s written is Greek Mathematicians: A Group Picture. He poses the question, if we were to take a group photograph of ancient Greek mathematicians, what would it look like? Some of the answers are a bit obvious perhaps, they’d be overwhelmingly male. But how many? Perhaps not as many as you might think. He gives evidence that Archimedes struggled to find anyone to send his results to, who might be able to appreciate them. He also raises questions about who would become a serious mathematician.

Anyhow, for the Archimedes Palimpsest there’s an hour long video on Google.

[googlevideo=http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?videoUrl=http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=8211813884612792878&playerMode=embedded]

You can download the video from Google.

technorati tags: archimedes, math, maths, ancient+science