This is such an honest account of what it’s like to do creative mathematics. Mathematicians don’t come up with the proofs first. First comes intuition. Rigor comes later. This essential role of intuition and imagination is often left out of high-school geometry courses, but it is essential to all creative mathematics. Archimedes concludes with the hope that “there will be some among the present as well as future generations who by means of the method here explained will be enabled to find other theorems which have not yet fallen to our share.”
