Like everything in central Rome, it is a palimpsest, layers of writing and meaning on top of, or at least next to, others.

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Each institution has been given five of the palimpsest's 170 pages.

ECONOMIST: The Archimedes palimpsest

By passing light from the palimpsest through a filter made up of liquid crystals, the researchers can adjust the wavelengths of the pictures that result by 10 billionths of a metre at a time.

ECONOMIST: The Archimedes palimpsest

The collector, however, has now made the palimpsest available for study, and it is being prodded and probed by scientists at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York state.

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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.

ECONOMIST: The Archimedes palimpsest

Among the most striking of the architectural drawings on display is the study for the plan of San Giovanni dei Fiorentini (1559-60), a sheet in which one can read the layers of overdrawing and erasure through which Michelangelo refined his design, transforming the sheet into a palimpsest of rejected ideas.

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