An ancient prayer book was discovered to contain notes from Archimedes, showing that the Greek mathematician already began to discover the principles of calculus more than a millennium before that branch of math was created. The prayer book was sold at Christie's Auction House for US$ 2 million.

The story of the prayer book starts with, of course, Archimedes who wrote his theories and equations on a papyrus 2,200 years ago. Some time later his notes were copied to animal-skin parchment. Then, 1,500 years later, a monk took down the copy from the shelf. His intention? He needed paper for a prayer book.

You can imagine what he did next. He cut the pages and scraped off the surface to remove the ink. He then used the semi-clean parchment to write his notes. Talk about religion giving science a hard time. Anyhow, the prayer book surfaced in 1908 and Archimedes' notes were found.

However, when the studies of the notes were completed, the book did as all mysterious books of history does. It disappeared, only to resurface again at Christie's Auction House when the family in France who kept the book for seventy years wondered if it was worth anything. (Well, they got US$ 2 million for it, so yes.)

After some intensive restoration, it was found that Archimedes' text contained his work titled The Method, which shows that he was already delving into equations concerning the infinity principle, a concept way ahead of his time. One can only wonder how mankind's technological evolution could have evolved had the text been discovered sooner. Then again homework would have been invented earlier, so maybe it was for the best.