Heron's Formula
Heron’s Formula
History of Mathematics
University of Phoenix
October 22, 2012
The event that I chose to discuss is Heron’s method that was written about in the three book series called metrica discovered in the period of about 60 AD. His formula for calculating the area of a triangle was one of the formulas which was written about in the books. Heron of Alexandria was also very well known by Hero. Their has been much debate on the birth date and ear of when Heron of Alexandria was alive. First people thought that it was around 150BC and the other school of thought was that he lived around 250BC. But later on historians were able to pin point the era that he lived in by one of the events that he wrote about. Heron referred to an eclipse that took place and therefore historians have been able to place the event which occurred at 23:00 hours on 13 March 62.
The event that happened in this period that came out of Heron’s work was known as Metrica which has written in three books. Metrica dealt with the area of triangles, quadrilaterals, regular polygons of between 3 and 12 sides, surfaces of cones, cylinders, prisms, pyramids and spheres. In his writings Heron put together all the geometric rules and formulas from ancient times. Some of them went as far back as Babylon. In his theory’s and writings her explains how to come up with the area and or volumes of different plane and solid figures. In book one their is also an iterative method to approximating the square root of a dumber to arbitrary accuracy. It is an interesting fact that computers today use a very similar method. Heron’s formula of a the area of a triange was different then other formulas because it used “half of the base times the height or half the modulus of a cross product of two sides, by requiring no arbitrary choice of side as a base or vertex as origin. Their are many reasons that being able to calculate area and volume are
History of Mathematics
University of Phoenix
October 22, 2012
The event that I chose to discuss is Heron’s method that was written about in the three book series called metrica discovered in the period of about 60 AD. His formula for calculating the area of a triangle was one of the formulas which was written about in the books. Heron of Alexandria was also very well known by Hero. Their has been much debate on the birth date and ear of when Heron of Alexandria was alive. First people thought that it was around 150BC and the other school of thought was that he lived around 250BC. But later on historians were able to pin point the era that he lived in by one of the events that he wrote about. Heron referred to an eclipse that took place and therefore historians have been able to place the event which occurred at 23:00 hours on 13 March 62.
The event that happened in this period that came out of Heron’s work was known as Metrica which has written in three books. Metrica dealt with the area of triangles, quadrilaterals, regular polygons of between 3 and 12 sides, surfaces of cones, cylinders, prisms, pyramids and spheres. In his writings Heron put together all the geometric rules and formulas from ancient times. Some of them went as far back as Babylon. In his theory’s and writings her explains how to come up with the area and or volumes of different plane and solid figures. In book one their is also an iterative method to approximating the square root of a dumber to arbitrary accuracy. It is an interesting fact that computers today use a very similar method. Heron’s formula of a the area of a triange was different then other formulas because it used “half of the base times the height or half the modulus of a cross product of two sides, by requiring no arbitrary choice of side as a base or vertex as origin. Their are many reasons that being able to calculate area and volume are