If you have an interest in old books, especially in the restoration of really old books, you will be interested in the story of an 800-year-old book that originally contained many of the writings of Archimedes. Many years later, the Archimedes text was scraped off and overwritten with text of prayers. However, the book still held a legible echo of the original text.
Thanks to extreme archival efforts, multi-spectral imaging techniques and computer algorithms, digital images have been produced that help the original Archimedes and ancient texts stand out from the visual clutter around them. The result is major changes in how we will think about Archimedes.
You can read more in an article in the Washington Post at http://goo.gl/MSX5L
My thanks to Larry Head, Jr. for telling me about this story.
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