In 1998, a medieval prayer book sold for $2 million at a Christie's auction in New York City, to an anonymous bidder. No one could figure out why it went for so much, especially since it was in terrible shape. And everyone wondered what this mysterious buyer knew that they didn't.

Now, almost a decade later, experts at Baltimore's Walters Art Museum, to which the manuscript has been entrusted, are learning the full extent of its value. It turns out that the prayers, penned by a Christian monk circa 1200 A.D., were written over an earlier text. But not just any text. The prayers were written over the lost works of Archimedes, the greatest mathematician of antiquity.

What did this ancient manuscript hold? Literally the secrets of the universe. And in The Archimedes Codex, Stanford professor Reviel Netz and Walters Art Museum curator William Noel, who have been on the front lines of its decoding, tell its full story.

Please join Reviel Netz, William Noel, and Paula B. as they delve into:

How they got involved with the codex

What sorts of issues they faced in conserving the artifact

Why Archimedes is so important

What has been discovered about Archimedes through the codex

Why a scribe wrote over Archimedes' texts

Where the codex was hiding over the centuries

How the codex ended up at the Stanford Linear Accelerator

Who's allowed to purchase precious artifacts like the codex, and under what conditions

How they finally cracked the text.