It’s at this point that I begin to feel real affection for Archimedes, because he does something in one of his essays that few geniuses ever do: He invites us in and reveals how he thinks. (I’m using the present tense here because the essay is so intimate, it feels like he’s speaking to us today.) He shares his private intuition, a vulnerable, soft-bellied thing, and says he hopes that future mathematicians will use it to solve problems that eluded him. Today this secret is known as the Method. I never heard of it in calculus class. We don’t teach it anymore. But I found the story of it and
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