Bait and Switch: The Case of the Archimedes Palimpsest

Thu 6 May 2021

You might think you know what you've got in a palimpsest. But of course you can't know until you can actually read it. When a group of people started to try to read the Archimedes Palimpsest, they thought they were digging up the ghost of a mathematician. But actually they dug up a philosopher and an orator, and set the scholarly world on fire. Join Dr Will Noel for this talk which takes a closer look at the Archimedes Palimpsest and the man behind it. A Q&A with Will and Dr Suzanne Paul, Keeper of Manuscripts and University Archives at Cambridge University Library, will follow his presentation.

A fragment of the Archimedes Palimpsest is in the University Library, and has been fully digitised and added to the Cambridge Digital Library. You can take a look at this single folio by clicking here.

The University Library's fragment of the Archimedes Palimpsest is also currently featured in the University Library's digital exhibition, Ghost Words: Reading the Past. View the exhibition by clicking here.

About the speaker: Dr William Noel is the J.T. Maltsberger III '55 Associate University Librarian for Special Collections at Princeton University Library. A scholar of Medieval Manuscripts, and a graduate of Downing College Cambridge, Dr. Will Noel was the director of an international project to decipher the Archimedes Palimpsest from 1999 to 2014. He was Sandars Reader in Bibliography at Cambridge University Library in 2019, and he has been a pioneer in the application of digital technologies in the service of cultural heritage. Dr Noel is a TED speaker, and a White House Open Science Champion of Change.

Cost: Free