PBS - Nova - Infinite Secrets Of Archimedes

Twenty-two centuries after Archimedes wrote his most revealing mathematical work, and eight centuries after a Christian monk erased what may have been the last surviving copy, the lost treatise has turned up and is being deciphered in a Baltimore museum. "Infinite Secrets" reports the story of the manuscript's amazing discovery and how modern technology is being used to read its startling contents.

Many of Archimedes' works disappeared during the Middle Ages, but some survived to help inspire the scientific revolution in the 16th and 17th centuries. But then in 1906 Danish scholar J. L. Heiberg discovered The Method, along with several other works by Archimedes, faintly visible beneath the bold lettering of a medieval prayer manual in an Istanbul library.
What a scribe once copied in the 10th century, a monk erased in the 13th, and Heiberg perceived only faintly, if at all, in the early 20th is now coming sharply into view thanks to the marriage of chemistry, computers, and multispectral imaging.