William Noel (August 1, 1965 - April 29, 2024) was a British archivist. He was an authority on medieval manuscripts.
Noel was born in the United Kingdom. He received a PhD in Medieval Studies from the University of Cambridge.
After receiving his PhD, Noel became the curator of rare books at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. At the museum, he led a project to digitize medieval manuscripts and make them freely available to the public.
Noel founded and directed the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies at UPenn. There, he developed OPenn, an online portal for collections of various departments at Penn.
Noel led the Archimedes Palimpsest Project using multispectral and xâÂÂray imaging to recover erased text from the lost works of Archimedes, including The Method and Stomachion.
In 2007, Noel co-authored with Reviel Netz The Archimedes Codex, an exploration of the history of the discovery of the Archimedes Palimpsest and their role in deciphering it.
In 2020, Noel was appointed the Associate University Librarian for Special Collections at Princeton University.
The Archimedes Codex was awarded the Neumann Prize of the British Society for the History of Mathematics.
In 2013, Noel was named a White House Open Science Champion of Change.
Noel died on April 29, 2024, in Edinburgh after being struck by a van.