ABSTRACT
The problems of infinitesimal character, as we have seen, were presented under many aspects in classical antiquity; and the ways of solving them, after a long critical elaboration, were systematized rigorously by the method of exhaustion attributed to Eudoxus of Cnido and applied by Euclid in Book XII of the Elements, which reached its highest point and its most illuminating discoveries in the work of Archimedes. Mter Archimedes, who already complained of the indifference with which his discoveries were received by the mathematicians of his day, decadence set in, and for centuries there was no progress worth noting.
