Imagine, then, how precious centuries-old manuscripts are, those like the Archimedes palimpsest that were hand-written on parchment and other materials long before the invention of the printing ...

The thousand-year-old manuscript contains the earliest surviving writings by Archimedes, a Greek thinker who is regarded as the greatest mathematician of antiquity. The story of the 174-page ...

Johannes had – presumably unwittingly – destroyed one of the most valuable relics of Archimedes’s work. Not just some notebook or single treatise, even: the manuscript now known as “Codex ...