I’m not a Mathematician, but I Play One on TV
Calculus and “The Method”
Two of the texts hiding in the prayer book have not appeared in any other copy of Archimedes’s work, so no one but Heiberg had studied them until now. One of them, titled The Method, has special historical significance. It could be considered the earliest known work on calculus.
Archimedes wrote The Method almost two thousand years before Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz developed calculus in the 1700s.
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Awesome! I love stories like this; they make me wonder how many other unique historical documents are hiding in the depths of archives somewhere.