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What relationship did Archimedes discover between a parabolic segment and a triangle with the same base and height?
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Archimedes
Archimedes, oil on canvas by Giuseppe Nogari, 18th century; in the Pushkin Fine Arts Museum, Moscow. Archimedes was an ancient Greek mathematician and inventor.
Archimedes discovered that the area of any segment of a parabola is exactly of the area of the triangle that shares the same base and height as that segment.12
He demonstrated this result in his treatise Quadrature of the Parabola, initially using a "mechanical" method of discovery and subsequently confirming it through conventional geometric proofs. His calculation effectively utilized the method of exhaustion and involved the summation of an infinite geometric series () to determine the area.12