In 1998, Christie's Auction House of London auctioned off a musty old prayer book for two million dollars.
What they thought was just a prayer book contained Greek inscriptions and accompanying diagrams that turned out to be the only surviving copies of several works by Archimedes from over 2,000 years earlier. And the researchers discovered that Archimedes was working out principles that, centuries later,
would form the heart of calculus and that he had a more sophisticated understanding of the concept of infinity than anyone had realized.