 This was the first infinitary result in Western mathematics, for the infinite was not eliminable using some alternative finitary technique but rather showed up as a feature of the very object that had to be measured. Torricelli’s infinitary result put enormous pressure on empiricist conceptions of infinity. The heuristic fruitfulness of the indivisibilist method was also accompanied by paradoxes that threatened its foundations. Among them was Tacquet’s proof using indivisibles that all triangles have the same area. The indivisibilists were able to deal with such paradoxes in various ways, but the foundations of the system remained shaky (for a detailed discussion of the foundations of the theory of indivisibles and the mathematical and philosophical issues connected to Torricelli’s result see Mancosu (1996) and Jullien (2015)).