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Eureka! Archimedes Found; Walters Art Gallery to Restore Ancient Manuscript
From:
The Washington Post
| Date:
June 16, 1999| Author:
Guy Gugliotta
| Copyright 1999 The Washington Post. This material is published under license from the Washington Post. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Washington Post.Copyright information
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In 1906, Danish classicist Johan Ludvig Heiberg opened an old book
in the private library of the Metochion of the Holy Sepulcher in
Istanbul and began to scrutinize it with a magnifying glass. He was
the first person in almost a millennium who understood exactly what
he was looking at.
Heiberg had found seven treatises in the original Greek by
Archimedes, regarded as the greatest mathematician of antiquity and
one of the greatest in history, perhaps without equal before Newton.
One of ...
