Lecture

Abstract: The Archimedes Palimpsest is a thousand year-old manuscript that contains a copy of seven treatises of Archimedes. Two hundred years after this copy was made, the manuscript was erased, overwritten and made into a prayer book. The manuscript is currently being conserved at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland. Three imaging scientists from The Boeing Company, the Rochester Institute of Technology and Johns Hopkins University have embarked on a multi-year project to recover the erased and obscured writings of Archimedes. This talk describes the multi-spectral imaging techniques being used to capture and manipulate digital images of the manuscript to reveal the erased text for scholars at Stanford and Oxford universities to read.

An archived webcast of the lecture is now available. View video.