"The spiral now called the "spiral of Archimedes," and described in the book On Spirals, was discovered by Archimedes, and not, as some believe, by his friend Conon. His treatise thereon is, perhaps the most wonderful of all his works. Nowadays, subjects of this kind are made easy by the use of the infinitesimal calculus. In its stead the ancients used the method of exhaustion. Nowhere is the fertility of his genius more grandly displayed than in his masterly use of this method. With Euclid and his predecessors the method of exhaustion was only the means of proving propositions which must have been seen and believed before they were proved. But in the hands of Archimedes it became an instrument of discovery."
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p. 42.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/A_History_of_Mathematics
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A History of Mathematics
A History of Mathematics by Florian Cajori was the first popular history of mathematics written in the United States. It was published in 1893.
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