Archimedes’s legacy lives on today. Consider the computer-animated movies that our kids love to watch. The characters in films like Shrek, Finding Nemo, and Toy Story seem lifelike and real, in part because they embody an Archimedean insight: Any smooth surface can be convincingly approximated by triangles. For example, here are three triangulations of a mannequin’s head. The more triangles we use and the smaller we make them, the better the approximation becomes.
