Samuel Payne will be leading our Mathematics Teachers' Circle of Austin (MTCA) on the topic of "Magic of the Moment."

After discovering the mathematical law of levers and moments, Archimedes famously declared: “Give me a long enough lever and a firm place to stand, and I can move the world.” Remarkably, he used this law not only for feats of engineering but also for pure mathematical discovery. In this activity, we will retrace Archimedes’s method of physical reasoning and his ingenious choices of balanced configurations of shapes and solids to recover his miraculous calculation of the volume of a sphere nearly two thousand years before the invention of calculus. (Archimedes so loved this calculation that he requested the result be inscribed on his tombstone!)