"Heron was a practical surveyor. This may account for the fact that his writings bear so little resemblance to those of the Greek authors, who considered it degrading the science to apply geometry to surveying. The character of his geometry is not Grecian but decidedly Egyptian. ...There are ...points of resemblance between Heron's writings and the ancient Ahmes papyrus. Thus Ahmes used unit-fractions exclusively; Heron uses them oftener than other fractions. Like Ahmes and the priests at Edfu, Heron divides complicated figures into simpler ones by drawing auxiliary lines; like them, he shows, throughout, a special fondness for the isosceles trapezoid. The writings of Heron satisfied a practical want, and for that reason were borrowed extensively by other peoples. We find traces of them in Rome, in the Occident during the Middle Ages, and even in India."
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https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/A_History_of_Mathematics
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A History of Mathematics
A History of Mathematics by Florian Cajori was the first popular history of mathematics written in the United States. It was published in 1893.
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