Name: Will Noel
Occupation: Curator of manuscripts and rare books, The Walters Art Museum
Why I love this piece: This piece is a perfect marriage of art and science. It is a photograph taken last year at The Walters Art Museum of a medieval manuscript.
It was taken in ultraviolet light to bring out erased writings. In this case the erased writing is just visible as a diagram. It is the only place in the world where you can see the diagram that Archimedes drew for his immensely elegant first proof in his treatise “The Method.”
It is a beautiful picture of a fragile survival that lies at the foundation of the Western tradition of mathematics and physics.
The world would be different without this diagram, which was only discovered in 1906, and only made truly clear after 10 years of conservation and imaging at The Walters.
All images of this manuscript, the Archimedes Palimpsest, are now free. Visit archimedespalimpsest.org.
BEYOND THE EYE
In his 2007 book “The Archimedes Codex,” Walters curator William Noel unravels the story behind the discovery of a 13th century prayer book that sold for more $2 million at a Christie’s auction in 1998.
Alternating chapters, Noel and co-author Reviel Netz take readers from the prayerbook’s beginnings in Constantinople to its arrival at the Walters Art Museum, donated by an anonymous bidder.
Once at the Walters, imaging technology reveals and deciphers the original text, lying underneath a monk’s prayers, as the earliest surviving manuscript from Archimedes, the ancient world’s greatest mathematician. To read a sample from the book, search
“Archimedes Codex” on amazon.com.
