Comment by tsoukase

At the time of his death by a Roman soldier the ancient mathematician Archimedes is said to yell: Don't disturb my circles, while he was calculating on sand. Much later, a few years ago, one of his handbooks, an overwritten palimpsest, was found to contain elements of modern calculus. If both these concepts where saved and spread through the middle ages, human civilisation might have been developed 1000 years earlier.