Talk:Hero of Alexandria

Should the "digital counter" invention be removed?
I can't find a source on it ANYWHERE and being that he died in 70 A.D. and this is reported to be made 30 years after he died is puzzling. JungleEntity (talk) 02:33, 16 March 2019 (UTC)

Add book content links?
At least one of the referenced books is freely available at the Library of Congress - https://www.loc.gov/resource/rbctos.2017gen16478/?st=gallery. What would be a good place to link to it?

Faught (talk) 22:56, 24 October 2021 (UTC)


 * I wouldn't link it, as the book linked is in Italian. If you find a English translation however, it might be useful to link it by editing the citation's name to link to the book, much like citation 6 :) JungleEntity (talk) 02:30, 4 July 2022 (UTC)

Rephrasing of sentence?
Thanks for your time and efforts regarding this page. Under Inventions, the sentence reads: "Some historians have conflated the two inventions to assert that the aeolipile was capable of useful work, which is not entirely false, air containing a trace of water vapor." To simplify the sentence, let's read it as, "The aeolipile was capable of useful work, air containing a trace of water vapor." Is there perhaps a better way to clarify the intent of this sentence? Taostlt (talk) 02:04, 4 July 2022 (UTC)

Controversy over dates
It seems there is some controversy about when Hero(n) lived, with various authors speculating dates anywhere between 200 BCE and 300 CE. The ~60 CE date comes from Neugebauer, based on a description of a partial eclipse which Heron is assumed to have witnessed, with the description only matching an eclipse from March of 62 CE. And there are also a couple of inventions which are presumed to be from Heron which seem to be from around the mid 1st century. But all of this is still somewhat speculative, and this Wikipedia article (a) doesn’t describe any of the controversy, and (b) makes far too certain an implication of the birth and death dates. As far as I can tell nothing is known about how old Heron was at his death. Here are a few sources discussing this topic: Heath 1921, Neugebauer 1948 p. 1033, Keyser 1988. Are there other recent sources that have settled these questions? –jacobolus (t) 19:52, 2 December 2022 (UTC)

Edit wars about ethnicity
I've tried to make the discussion about Heron's ethnicity more precise (that is, explicitly say we don't know anything whatsoever about it). There's still apparently a dispute about whether Heron should be called "Greek" or not, with user:Khirurg on the side of using the description "Greek", user:PrecariousWorlds wanting "Greco-Roman", an IP editor wanting "Egyptian Greek", user:PCC556 preferring to remove speculation about ethnicity, another IP editor preferring the description "Hellenistic", etc.

The word "Hellenistic" is more precise here, insofar as we're talking about someone living in Roman Egypt, but Heron was writing in Greek, part of a mathematical tradition which earlier centered on Athens and involved primarily ethnic Greeks from around the Mediterranean, so "Greek" is also not entirely misleading. Heron's mathematical work is also notable for apparent Egyptian influence (though we haven't discussed that in this article).

I honestly don't care what description is settled on, but going back and forth about it is a pointless distraction. The terms Greek mathematics vs. Hellenistic mathematics currently redirect to the same article, because we don't have enough good material written to make separate articles about different periods in mathematical history. If we look to reliable sources, different authors prefer different choices among these, with historians generally trying to be more precise at the expense of complication and mathematicians trying to simplify and streamline the story because they care more about the mathematical content. –jacobolus (t) 18:28, 27 June 2024 (UTC)


 * I only changed it to 'Greco-Roman' as I believed it was convention to state the nationality of the person as well as his ethnicity, and Hero was both a Roman national and a Greek. PrecariousWorlds (talk) 19:07, 27 June 2024 (UTC)
 * We have no evidence about his ethnicity, nor do we know whether he was a Roman citizen. All we know is that he was called "Heron of Alexandria" and wrote various books about mechanics/mathematics/etc. in Greek. Alexandria at the time was something like NYC or London today, a cosmopolitan metropolis filled with people from all over the known world. –jacobolus (t) 23:35, 27 June 2024 (UTC)