Heron of Alexandria

Hero of Alexandria, also known as Heron of Alexandria, who was active probably in the first or second century AD, was a Greek mathematician and engineer working in Alexandria during the Roman era. He has been described as the greatest experimentalist of antiquity and a representative of the Hellenistic scientific tradition. He published a well-recognized description of a steam-powered device called the aeolipile, also known as Hero's engine, and among his most famous inventions was a windwheel, the earliest instance of wind harnessing on land. In his work Mechanics he described pantographs. In mathematics he wrote a commentary on Euclid's Elements and a work on applied geometry known as the Metrica, and he is mostly remembered for Heron's formula for the area of a triangle from the lengths of its sides.