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Hero of Alexandria

Hero of Alexandria: History and modern views on his life.


Zachery Mathison
Salt Lake Community College

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Abstract
Hero was a Professor at the library of Alexandria. He has published many works throughout his
life, many of which was published in many other languages and in other countries. With the
burning of the library of Alexandria many of his works, history, and inventions were destroyed.
Since then many people have been speculating when he lived and what kind of life did he live.
Most people looked at his surviving list of inventions and thought that he was a showman, and
artisan, who didnt know much of science. Others looked at him and thought he stole his works
from other published others and did not understand it at all for himself. It wasnt until recent
discoveries that we started to understand not only who he was but when he lived. Two major
contributors of who Hero was are Neugebauer and Hammer-Jensen. Both authors had different
views and theories about who he was. In this article I will go into detail to what the facts say.

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Hero of Alexandria: History and modern views on his life.
Hero (also known as Heron) of Alexandria was a professor of physics at the library of
Alexandria. Most of his works and personal history was destroyed but some of them were saved.
A couple of his works were saved in Greek, few of them were in Latin, but the bulk of what we
know of his works was in Arabic. Due to this most of all we know of him is up for speculation.
Over the years we have been trying to stitch what we know about him together based on what
little has survived. For the longest time we have been guessing on when he has lived, what kind
of man he was, and quite frankly how smart he was.
Heros Life
Hero lived around 62 AD. That date was derived from both his works, other works, and
observations about his environment. The first mention of Heron was by Pappus who lived at 300
AD, which suggest that he did not live later than that. The other date that we have deduced was
Hero himself cites the work of Archimedes who lived 212 BC, which also suggest that he lived
either during or after that. So far a long time we believed that he could have lived from 200 BC
to 300 AD. Through other scholarly deduction they have thought he has lived from 150 BC to
250 BC.
It wasnt until a man named Otto E. Neugebauer who has shortened this four hundred
year span to a mere seventy years. Hero spoke of an eclipse of the moon in his surviving works
called Dioptra. Given the location at where he was and the type of eclipse that was observed you
could use some complex geometry to tell us when it was observed. Neugebauer was the first to
actually do the math and calculate when this would happen and he said that it was 62 AD. It was
then that he said that he must of lived from 2 AD to 62 AD.

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Who was Hero
Not only was his life span up in debate but also what kind of man he was. Many people
believe that he was a mere artisan and not a real inventor or physicist. One of the biggest
defenders of this belief was Hermann Alexander Diels. He often stated that all of his prevalent
machines that he created were nothing more than mere parlor tricks. It is true that most of his
inventions were apparatuses for stage or entertainment but not all. In fact the only two inventions
credited to Hero that doesnt seem like it was meant for the theater was a fire pump and a water
organ.
Another prevalent theory that keeps coming up is that Hero was no real physicist that he
just copied from already popular works and didnt really understand the material that he copied.
I. Hammer-Jensen was firm believer in this theory, and it seems that Diels also believes the same
thing. They are in the belief that he is an engineer of sorts that didnt know much of what physics
entails. Though at the time that these individuals believed this the only book that was written by
hero (that was known) was Pneumatics. This book was his largest and did not contain any
theoretical or new concepts for science. It was just a collection of his Tricks. Even in the
introduction of the original work was up for debate for a long time. People assumed that most of
the original thesis was a mere copy and paste version of Archimedes.
Works of Hero
Since then two major books have been found and published to give him more support,
Mechanics and Metrica. These works were found and published in 1896 and in these works it
showed that Hero had all of the mathematical knowledge that was constant with a physics
professor in that time. These books included a compilation of various formulas going back to

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ancient Babylon. In these works we can assume that he was a writer of textbooks as well with the
ways that he leaves some things out that should be common sense for students.
Within Metrica there are a few books all describing different mathematical formulas and
how to use them. The first book deals with area and talks about Archimedes formula to calculate
the area of the triangle. It also shows you how to calculate the square roots of certain numbers,
also known by the Babylonians. The second book deals with calculating volumes of solids and
discusses five different objects, the cube, pyramid, octahedron (eight sides), dodecahedron
(twelve sides), and icosahedron (twenty sides). The third book talks about basic geometry and
the division of planes into parts.
The Metrica and the Mechanics were far more concise and technical than the Pneumatics.
With the introduction of the Metrica and the Mechanics it gives us far more insight on what his
writings were like. For the newer pieces looked like it was geared more towards higher students
who were learning physics, while Pneumatics was more chaotic and didnt have much form.
With that said a lot of scholars believed that pneumatics was written as notes or further
explanation for another textbook that has since been destroyed. With this explanation it makes
more and more sense that he was a professor of mathematics, science and mechanics at the
library of Alexandria.

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References
Hero of Alexandria Britannica: Encyclopdia Britannica, Inc. April 2014. Web. 19 Nov. 2015
<http://www.britannica.com/biography/Heron-of-Alexandria>
Hero of Alexandria Wikipedia: The free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 13 October
2015. Web. 19 November 2015 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero_of_Alexandria>

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