Eureka: Archimedes’ secrets are revealed

On stepping into his bath and realizing that its rising water level showed a way to measure the volume of his king’s crown to determine if it was pure gold, the mathematician Archimedes famously shouted “Eureka!” -- Greek for “I have found it!”

Only history buffs and math geeks will have the same reaction if they stumble upon “Infinite Secrets,” a slightly daunting edition of “Nova” (8 p.m., KCET) devoted to the odd history and impressive contents of Archimedes’ most revealing work, “The Method.” Even so, intrepid viewers will get enlightening glimpses into two worlds: ancient math and modern library science.

The Einstein of his era, Archimedes discovered the value of pi and designed sophisticated war machines for his native Syracuse to use against the Romans, one of whom killed him in 212 BC.

Many of his works disappeared during the Middle Ages, but some survived to help inspire the scientific revolution in the 16th and 17th centuries. One document that seemed irretrievably lost was “The Method,” which reputedly showed how he achieved his results.

But in 1906, a Danish scholar discovered the treatise faintly visible beneath the lettering of a medieval prayer book in an Istanbul library. A scribe in the 13th century had incompletely erased a 10th century copy of Archimedes’ work and written over it, a common practice that allowed reuse of parchment and produced a palimpsest.

The palimpsest vanished during World War I and, although it had been photographed, many of the words were illegible.

All was set right in 1998, when the palimpsest resurfaced at a New York auction. It had acquired a shoddy new binding, a chronic case of mold and other defects. The book garnered $2 million from a high-tech billionaire, who delivered it in a gym bag to a Baltimore museum, where specialists have gone to work on what the curator calls “Archimedes’ brain in a box.”

Relying on image-processing techniques, scholars believe Archimedes was close to inventing calculus, the tool at the heart of advanced science and engineering. Now continues the painfully slow process of deciphering the text -- informative but far from a “Eureka!” moment.