A long-lost text by the ancient Greek mathematician shows that he had begun to discover the principles of calculus. The top layer of writing in this 700-year-old book describes Christian prayers. But underneath, almost obliterated, are the only surviving copies of many of the works of the ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes. Two of the texts hiding in the prayer book have not appeared in any other copy of Archimedes’s work; one of them, titled The Method, has special historical significance. It could be considered the earliest known work on calculus. Archimedes wrote The Method almost two thousand years before Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz developed calculus in the 1700s.
Read the article: A Prayer For Archimedes