There is little known about Heron of Alexandria, also known as Hero because he lived around 20 CE, about 2000 years ago. He was an incredible inventor and a wonderful mathematician. He taught at the University of Alexandria in Alexandria, Egypt and specialized in mathematics, mechanics and physics.

As well as being a mathematician, Heron of Alexandria was also an inventor. He invented many things that we use today such as vending machines. For his machine, if you paid a coin, you would get holy water. He made toys too like puppets and singing birds. He also made a steam engine where steam would turn a wheel. He even made sound effects by making a drum that when a metal ball dropped, it would sound like thunder for plays.

Heron was a great mathematician. He wrote a book called Metrica. Metrica had many rules and formulas from Egypt, Greece and Babylon. Metrica was not known about until 1896 when it was found in a library in Istanbul. He is most famous for Hero’s Formula which calculates the area of a triangle with given sides.Heron focused on practical math such as calculating areas and volumes of pyramids, cylinders and prisms. He also liked challenges like calculating the capacity of a stadium or figuring out the number of jars a ship could hold.

One day he was trying to calculate the volume of a pyramid but he gave up when he tried to solve the square root of 81 – 114. The ancient Greeks, Egyptians and Babylonians did not understand the concept of negative numbers, so it makes sense that Heron of Alexandria would not know what to do with the square root of -63. So he ignored it! However, he was the first mathematician to come up with it even if he didn’t understand it.

About 1,500 years later in 1572, Rafael Bombello wrote down rules for multiplying complex numbers, but Heron of Alexandria was the first to come up with them!

Works Cited

Chu-Carroll, Mark C. “i: The Imaginary Number (Classic Repost).” Good Math, Bad Math, ScienceBlogs, 25 Nov. 2009, scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2008/12/25/i-the-imaginary-number-classic/.

The Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica. “Heron of Alexandria.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 24 Jan. 2017, www.britannica.com/biography/Heron-of-Alexandria.

“Heron Of Alexandria.” 2012. Famous-Mathematicians.com 14 November, http://www.famous-mathematicians.com/heron-of-alexandria/
Shuttleworth, Martyn. “Heron of Alexandria.” A Beautiful Mind – Geometer and Mathematician, Explorable, 118 Oct. 2011, explorable.com/heron-of-alexandria.