Meaning of Eureka

Many others have told and retold this story about Archimedes. Here are some other sites on the subject:

A critique of the methodology

A brief retelling

An Archimedes timeline

A brief biography

A program on NOVA on PBS

Recently, an exciting recovery has been accomplished of text written by Archimedes. The previously unreadable text is part of a document known as the Archimedes Palimpsest. A palimpsest is a document that has been written on, scraped off, and written on again. In this case, the original Archimedes manuscript, incuding geometrical drawings, was copied by a scribe onto goatskin parchment in the 10th century. 300 years later, it was scraped off by another scribe and Greek Orthodox prayers were written on the pages. Some of the original work of Archimedes could be discerned under the prayers. However, reading the final portions required use of the Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory at Stanford University. A reprint of the report of the process and the recovery is available from Science Magazine.