Received 26 October ; accepted 24 December ; published 29 December Archimedes died in B. His scientific production is immense and extraordinary, but in the sixth century A. Only in the ninth and tenth century the Byzantine culture knows a flourishing rebirth. The first two survived the destruction and plundering of Constantinople by the Crusaders, in April , in which hundreds of thousands of volumes were destroyed this contained more books than men and disappeared, only to reappear in the West with the Renaissance, and then disappeared again permanently after various vicissitudes.
Instead, the code C knows a particular story. Between the end of the eleventh century and the beginning of the twelfth century a scribe in possession of the code C decided to use it to write a Eucologion and to do this he scraped and tampered it. For centuries no one had spoken of it. Only in Heiberg, a Danish scholar, had information that some mathematician writings were hidden in the manuscript-Eucologion, he went to Constantinople, and succeeded in large part in deciphering what there was written, publishing it, thus making it know to the world.
We know works by Archimedes disappeared in their original Greek language which was well-known but they were only translated into Latin. With the discovery of the letter to Eratosthenes, it seems to thin the air of mystery that has surrounded the mathematical research in Archimedes Boscarino, The manuscript with the disturbing events of the two world wars disappeared again.
It reappeared in at an auction sale in New York and bought by a wealthy American just two million dollars. Fortunately he delivered it to a research center in Baltimore, where a group of scholars using modern technologies restored the old manuscript, which was published in for scholars and for a wider reading public.
The scholar Reviel Netz carefully studied the place that the code C would have had in the Archimedean production and studied the innovations that it brought in particular. In his view, three novelties can be found in the rereading of the preface of the Letter to Eratosthenes. The second novelty concerns the interpretation of a term used by Archimedes, when addressing to Eratosthenes he says that the new mechanic tropos would make him proficient in mathematical discoveries.
