Talk on imaging the Antikythera mechanism

Imaging the Antikythera Mechanism: A Mechanical Computer from 150
    BCE
April 23, 2015
7pm
Officers Club
Moraga Hall
The Presidio
San Francisco

Event Co-sponsored by Presidio Trust Heritage Programs and the Bay
Area Art Conservation Guild

This program is free and open to the public.

In 1900, a party of sponge divers chanced on the wreck of a Roman
merchant vessel between Crete and mainland Greece.  On board
numerous ancient Greek treasures were found, among them a mysterious
lump of clay that split open to reveal 'mathematical gears' as it
dried out.  This object is now known as the Antikythera Mechanism,
and what it tells us about the advanced nature of ancient Greek
science and technology is remarkable.  In 2005 we traveled to the
National Archaeological Museum in Athens to apply our Reflectance
Imaging methods to the Mechanism in the hopes of revealing ancient
writing on the device.  We were successful, and epigraphers are now
able to decipher 3000 characters compared with the original 800
known.  This lead to an understanding that the device was a
mechanical, astronomical computer capable of predicting solar and
lunar eclipses along with other celestial events decades out.  This
talk will overview both the imaging methods as well as what they
reveal about the Antikythera Mechanism.

Presenter: Tom Malzbender

    Tom is a research scientist working at the intersection of
    interactive 3D computer graphics, imaging, computer vision and
    signal processing.  He completed a 31 year career at
    Hewlett-Packard Laboratories as a Distinguished Technologist and
    now serves on the board of Cultural Heritage Imaging.


                                  ***
                  Conservation DistList Instance 28:43
                 Distributed: Saturday, April 11, 2015
                       Message Id: cdl-28-43-003
                                  ***