New Archimedes writings discovered. Calculus existed in antiquity.

BurnTheShips

A palimpsest discovered. The ancient Greeks had a grip on calculus.

Pretty amazing.

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/8974/title/A_Prayer_for_Archimedes

BTS

coffee_black

Interesting.... kind of changes things a bit from what we were taught regarding the history of mathematics...

Coffee

I love it when new texts are discovered or made readable via multispectral imaging and other new technologies. The carbonized Hercuulaneum philosophical treatises (burned during the eruption of Vesuvius of AD 79) and some of the Dead Sea Scrolls are other texts that have been made readable through infrared imaging. Who knows what other lost writings from antiquity are preserved in part in palimpsests or MSS that are unreadable with the naked eye. The Aramaic scroll from Elephanine, Egypt containing the book of Ahiqar (which is alluded to in the apocryphal book of Tobit) contains an erased royal customs list of Phoenician and Ionian ships visiting Egypt, dating to 475 BC. Not only does this add to our knowledge of maritime trade in Persian-era Egypt and Egyptian methods of accountancy, but it also mutiplies the amount of early Aramaic available to philologists and it also helps date the MS of Ahiqar.

One new technology I am really excited about is the use of DNA in the study of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Many of the MSS are heavily damaged with many lacunae, and there are a large number of small fragments that cannot be associated with larger fragments. Since these MSS were made from ibex and goat parchments, it is possible to sequence of the DNA contained in the fragments and use that information to help associate fragments together and hopefully better reconstruct the MSS. So there many still be new Dead Sea Scroll discoveries in the future as new technologies help add to our state of knowledge. Some archaeologists are even studying the DNA in animal bones found at Qumran to see if they match the DNA in the parchments. If there is a match, that would potentially solve the ongoing debate in scholarship on whether the scrolls were produced by the community at Qumran or were deposited there independantly.

SacrificialLoon

I hope they find his writings on death rays.

Seriously though that's really cool. Kinda sad though, all the knowledge we lost that had to be rediscovered. I often wonder what if the library at Alexandria had survived, what if Heron's Aeropile was devloped into the first steam engine? The West lost a thousand years through a self inflicted lobotomy as Carl Sagan put it.

Twitch

Cool

So much knowledge originated from early Greece, the foundations of much of modern society in many ways. Of course, not all of the theories were correct (Ptolemy & the earth centered universe) but it seems like they had a real jumpstart with using the ol' noodle, especially in math, mechanics, philosophy and other interesting stuff.

As for the calculus, I'll bet Newton is rolling over right about now; Leibniz is mildy amused

Alpaca

This is acutually a little dated info. About 2 to 3 years ago PBS had a NOVA special devoted to this subject. It was fascinating and if you have a chance to watch it you should.

One can only speculate where technology would be (at least 2,000 years ahead of where we are now) if the concept of calculus had not been buried for so many centuries.