Reviel Netz

The book's subject-matter is extremely interesting and Netz has an enviable and deep grasp of a wide range of material and associated background. I am happy to note the classicist opinion: the importance of the book lies in the kinds of questions it asks, and it’s demonstration of how we might begin to answer them. This is what makes the book a game changer.

Unfortunately, Netz's quantitative analysis is marred by elementary and avoidable technical errors. The question then is how much this matters. Since he clearly knows what he is talking about, it is quite possible that his conclusions are correct even so. It is also possible that the quantitative data he has collected would also support his conclusions if differently [properly] handled.

But one would really need to start from the beginning, with a technically well-founded specification of the data to collect to address specific and well-posed research questions.

I think my main concern would be not with faulty analysis - which can be fixed, especially if the data still exists - but with faulty study design, so that the data collected may be insufficient in quantity or just of the wrong type to answer the questions… (more)

It is rare that “lost” writings of ancient scientists and philosophers are discovered today. But this is exactly what happened in 1998 when a medieval prayer book was offered for sale. It was a codex (a manuscript book) with several missing pages and several forged pictures, but the parchment reused by the medieval scribe contained texts from Archimedes and other ancient scholars. It became clear that this was a manuscript that went missing in the mid 20th century but had been studied earlier in the century by the noted Archimedes scholar Heiberg.

This sets the stage for the book, the joint efforts of Reviel Netz, a scholar of ancient science, and William Noel, curator of the Walters Art Museum. They traded chapters with Dr. Netz writing about the Archimedes and his math and science and Dr. Noel writing about the book and its challenges, the building of the team to read the underlying palimpsest (and in the case of the forgeries, the prayer book text), and discovering the other lost writings including some pages of Hyperides, a Greek orator.

The science and math was challenging to understand, especially the math notation. Once I could equate the notation of Archimedes with one that I knew and understood, the reading became much easier. The science of imaging was one of the most interesting sections of Dr. Noel’s presentation. The images were clearly presented in the text with 16 pages of color plates and numerous black and white images. The authors also provided a website for the Archimedes project that contains images as well text and video. The bibliography is extensive and includes much supplemental reading.

For anyone interested in manuscripts, codices, palimpsests, math and the beginning of modern science, this book is a great introduction.… (more)

This small book has been a tough slog for me. There is a lot of good in this book and I applaud (as has ever been my wont) the author's cross-genre fertilization: he has done a lot of interesting work in this realm.

Something about the style of the book is troubling. It is difficult to put my finger on it -- this could be merely a symptom of some discomfort with trying to parse the translations from the Hellenistic texts, which are often obscure, to say the least. Netz does not have a lot of space to consistently clarify what these texts are driving at and so, while his arguments about the unique stylistics of Hellenistic mathematics are not in themselves difficult, it IS sometimes difficult to connect them to the translated slabs of words we see here.

This is a worthwhile book if the reader is interested in the history of mathematics or in genre-crossing efforts. Not by any means an easy romp, but I did not expect one.… (more)