caelano's Journal

Must steal for CoC
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/14/science/14MATH.html

Imaging techniques pay off once again - new "old" results from Archimedes. I particularly like the way in which manuscripts come down the ages - erased, written over, attacked by mold, lost in war, sold to the rich, lent to museums. Matching diagrams in the text to modern day puzzles.

It was chance that led Dr. Netz to his first insight into the nature of the Stomachion. Last August, he says, just as he was about to start transcribing one of the manuscript pages, he got a gift in the mail, a blue cut-glass model of a Stomachion puzzle. It was made by a retired businessman from California who found Dr. Netz on the Internet as a renowned Archimedes scholar. Looking at the model, Dr. Netz realized that a diagram on the page he was transcribing was actually a rearrangement of the pieces of the Stomachion puzzle. Suddenly, he understood what Archimedes was getting at.

The diagram involved 14 pieces, and the word "multitude" seemed to be associated with it. Mr. Heiberg and those who followed him thought this meant that you could get many figures by rearranging the pieces.

"This is part of the reason people didn't see what it was about," Dr. Netz said. But the old interpretation seemed trivial, hardly worth Archimedes' time.

As he examined the manuscript pages, piecing together their text, he realized that what Archimedes was really asking seemed to be, "How many ways can you put the pieces together to make a square?" That question, Dr. Netz said, "has mathematical meaning."

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