"By the ancients [Greeks], arithmetic was studied through geometry. If a number was regarded as simple, it was a line. If as composite, it was a rectangular figure. To multiply was to construct a rectangle, to divide was to find one of its sides. Traces of this still remain in such terms as square, cube, common measure, but the method itself is obsolete. Hence, it requires an effort to conceive of the square root, not as that which multiplied into itself produces a given number, but as the side of a square, which [square area] either is the number, or is equal to the rectangle which is the number."
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Lewis Campbell, The Theaetetus of Plato (1861) p. 19.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Number
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