abstract:[[Ostomachion is a dissection puzzle in the Archimedes Palimpsest (shown after Suter from a different source; this version must be stretched to twice the width to conform to the Palimpsest)]]
It wasn't until 1906 that ascholar came across theprayerbookin a libraryandrealizeditwas a palimpsest, and that the underlying layeroftextscouldonly have come from Archimedes.
According to Reviel Netz, a classicist at Stanford University who is working on the palimpsest, the original uncorrected diagrams suggest that Archimedes was more concerned with the mathematical arguments his geometry gave rise to than with the real-world behaviour of the objects he wrote about.