Agreed. I have often noticed a tendency among professionals who should know better, to presume that ancient peoples were somehow less intelligent than we are, a

Agreed. I have often noticed a tendency among professionals who should know better, to presume that ancient peoples were somehow less intelligent than we are, and less capable of applying their minds to complicated and even abstract problems. It is just plain not true, and there is so much anthropological evidence to demonstrate this fallacy that it is idiotic that it is still repeated. In this case, it is an especially bad assumption, given that he is talking about a system of mathematics that significantly post-dates the great Greek mathematicians. If Archimedes could invent a method to solve problems today solved by integral calculus, 2000 years before Newton, and implemented Riemann sums in his methods, I hardly think that this little trick confounded explanation at the time it was used, particularly since it works with ANY system of notation.