The Archimedes Codex tells two stories: that of Archimedes himself and his contributions to mathematics, and that of the small battered parchment volume which is our only source for some of his discoveries. The book alternates between these two stories.
It turns out that it is a minor miracle that these texts by Archimedes survived at all, and one can feel sympathetic even to the monk who covered Archimedes’ text with prayers, and to whoever had the text further obliterated with forged paintings, when the probable history of the volume is reconstructed.
The mathematical chapters can be hard going if you haven’t done any geometry for a while. On the other hand, I found the somewhat joky style of the opening chapter irritating at first, but fortunately this slipped away a bit in subsequent chapters. A couple of minor players in this story are known to me personally and they are recognisably described, so I feel confident that the character sketches of others are accurate too.
- Publisher: Phoenix (an Imprint of The Orion Publishing Group Ltd ) (March 20, 2008)
- ISBN-10: 0753823721
- ISBN-13: 978-0753823729