Pi
In Our Time
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The Exhaustion Method of Archimedes
Archimedes did a lot of things which push Greek mathematics further than was normal at the time. His great work, the one that had the diagram inscribed on his tomb is the sphere and cylinder. And he used a technique which had been invented a little bit earlier called exhaustion. That process lies at the heart of what later became the calculus. It's often introduced in terms of slicing things up into very, very thin slices infinitely, infinitely infinitely thin slices and adding them all together to get an answer.
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