The man who thought like a ship

the long version

"J. Richard "Dick" Steffy stood inside the limestone hall of the Crusader castle in Cyprus and looked at the wood fragments arrayed before him. they were old beyond belief. For more than two millennia they had remained on the sea floor, eaten by worms and soaking up seawater until they had the consistency of wet cardboard. There were some 6,000 pieces in all, and Steffy's job was to put them all back together in their original shape. ... He has volunteered for the job even though he had no qualifications for it. For twenty-five years he had been an electrician in a small land-locked town in Pennsylvania. He held no advanced degrees - his understanding of ships was entirely self-taught. Yet he would find himself half a world away from his home town, planning to reassemble a ship that last sailed during the reign of Alexander the Great, and he planned to do it using mathematical formulas and modeling techniques that he had devel;oped in his basement as a hobby."--Jacket.