Giuseppe Nogari “Archimedes (c.287-212 BC)”
From TED.com:
How do you read a two-thousand-year-old manuscript that has been erased, cut up, written on and painted over? With a powerful particle accelerator, of course! Ancient books curator William Noel tells the fascinating story behind the Archimedes palimpsest, a Byzantine prayer book containing previously-unknown original writings from ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes and others.
See the video here.
From the independent.co.uk article:
Stone Age Britons had a sophisticated knowledge of geometry to rival Pythagoras – 2,000 years before the Greek “father of numbers” was born, according to a new study of Stonehenge.
Five years of detailed research, carried out by the Oxford University landscape archaeologist Anthony Johnson, claims that Stonehenge was designed and built using advanced geometry.
The discovery has immense implications for understanding the monument – and the people who built it. It also suggests it is more rooted in the study of geometry than early astronomy – as is often speculated.
Mr Johnson believes the geometrical knowledge eventually used to plan, pre-fabricate and erect Stonehenge was learnt empirically hundreds of years earlier through the construction of much simpler monuments.
He also argues that this knowledge was regarded as a form of arcane wisdom or magic that conferred a privileged status on the elite who possessed it, as it also featured on gold artefacts found in prehistoric graves.
Read the article here.
From the philosophersnet.com website:
When Thomas Hobbes died in 1679 at the age of 91 his reputation as an atheist in religion and an absolutist in politics not only rendered him highly disreputable but also served to shunt his political ideas into relative obscurity for the next three hundred years. He was undoubtedly ahead of his time and his contribution to political philosophy has only been fully recognised more recently in the huge range of scholarship devoted to his most enduring work, Leviathan (1651).
Read the rest of the article here.
Additional info on Hobbes at Wikipedia here.
