Steiner gave a geometric construction rather than an analytic solution, not surprising
since the analytic equations describing the location of the point are complicated. This is
an excellent instance where a synthetic geometry approach is more advantageous than
analysis. In contrast, the point that minimizes the sum of the squares of the distances
to the vertices of the triangle is easily proven analytically to be the centroid, i.e., the
common point of the medians. For this problem, a geometric approach is difficult.