How a 13th-Century Monk Created a Prayer Manuscript by Writing Over—and Accidentally Preserving—Archimedes’ Groundbreaking Mathematical Works

In Jerusalem of the year 1229, there lived a Greek Ortho­dox monk named Johannes Myronas. For the pages he’d scrubbed were a Greek com­pi­la­tion con­tain­ing the only known copy of cer­tain works by the ancient poly­math Archimedes. As it turns out, Myronas com­mit­ted per­haps the most notable act of inad­ver­tent preser­va­tion in the his­to­ry of math­e­mat­ics. None of this proves that Archimedes was the inven­tor of com­bi­na­torics or cal­cu­lus, exact­ly, but it does show us just how much fur­ther he’d man­aged to push Greek math­e­mat­ics than we’d pre­vi­ous­ly known. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro.