Public lecture on Physical-Mathematical techniques to investigate ancient documents

25th October 2017. Laboratory member Emanuele Salerno has given a public talk reporting some of the Lab experience in digital document image analysis. This has been one of our topics during almost 20 years, supported by several European and regional research programs. The lecture has mainly been dealing with the story of the “Archimedes palimpsest”, a 10th-century manuscript codex with copies of seven treaties by Archimedes of Syracuse that, centuries later, have been scratched away to reuse the parchment for another book. After being bought by a private collector for $2.000.000, the book has been thoroughly studied to help scholars in reading the important mathematical texts barely visible behind the more recent writing.

The lecture has been given in the framework of the science communication program “Areaperta” organized by the CNR campus in Pisa.

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