According to this article in sciencenews.org, about 2200 years ago the Greek mathematician Archimedes was working on some of the same problems that motivated Newton and Leibniz to each invent calculus. Until recently, it was believed that his strict adherence to Aristotle's ideas about infinity held him back, but new findings show he got really darn close to nailing it - 1900 years early. Bright fellow!
Anyway, we only know of this because Archimedes wrote it on a papyrus scroll. Some time later, somebody copied it to parchment. Then, about 700 years ago a monk needed some parchment, so he grabbed some useless old Greek scroll (that happened to contain ideas that humanity wouldn't rediscover for another 400 years), scraped off the ink, and made a prayer book out of it. Dark ages, indeed!
In 1908, someone discovered that the faint Greek letters running up the pages belonged to Archimedes. The book was studied for a while, but then mysteriously disappeared. Ten years ago, it turned up in someone's closet, was auctioned to an anonymous bidder for $2.0 million, and began a long restoration and research effort. The results are starting to come out now.
Pretty cool.
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