29 May Lost and found text
Early in 1229, Johannes Myronas, a monk working in Jerusalem, wrote a prayer book. He constructed the book on parchment he recycled from several documents, including a manuscript by the Greek mathematician Archimedes of Syracuse (287–212 BC).
Myronas erased Archimedes’ words, separated the pages of his manuscript, cut the pages in half, turned them sideways, shuffled them, and transcribed his own prayers onto them. In the years since, the prayer book was drizzled with wax and repaired with various types of glue. Some its pages were covered again with forged paintings.
In this way, a unique work by one of humankind’s seminal mathematicians was lost for eight centuries. In the TED talk below, curator William Noel of the Walters Art Museum recounts the extraordinary steps by which a group of scientists recovered the text. It’s a great yarn, but the real lesson is not about science, but about how data increases in value when it is shared.