2. Heron of Alexandria
• Heron of Alexandria was an ancient
Greek mathematician and engineer
who was active in his native city of
Alexandria, Roman Egypt. He lived
between the 1st century BC and the 1st
century AD. He is considered the
greatest experimenter of antiquity
and his work is representative of the
Hellenistic scientific tradition.
3. • Heron published a well recognized description of
a steam-powered device called an aeolipile
(hence sometimes called a "Heron engine").
Among his most famous inventions was a
windwheel, constituting the earliest instance of
wind harnessing on land. Some of his ideas were
derived from the works of Ctesibius.
4. • Heron described a method of iteratively
computing the square root.
• Today, though, his name is most closely
associated with Heron's Formula for finding
the area of a triangle from its side lengths.
• The imaginary number, or imaginary unit, is
also noted to have been first observed by
Heron while calculating the volume of a
pyramidal frustum.
