"Heron was by no means a geometer of the Euclidean School. He is a practical man who will use any means to attain his end and is... untrammelled by... classical restrictions. He is... a mechanician who, unlike Archimedes, is... proud of his... ingenuity. He adds... almost nothing, to the geometry of his time but he is learned in the... bookwork. On the other hand... he is the first Greek writer who uses a geometrical nomenclature and symbolism, without the geometrical limitations, for algebraical purposes, who adds lines to areas and multiplies squares by squares and finds numerical roots for quadratic equations. Hence, for a similar reason to... de Morgan... it is now commonly believed that Heron was an Egyptian. ...[T]he ...style of his work recalls ... ... [A]lgebra was an Egyptian art and ...the symbolism of Diophantus was of Egyptian origin. ...[I]f Heron was not a Greek, he relied almost entirely on Greek learning and did not resort to the ...priestly tradition ...He is a man who writes in Greek upon Greek subjects, but who thinks in Egyptian. [Following is in the footnote.] Let it be remembered that the seqt-calcalation of Ahmes leads to trigonometry: his hau-calculation to algebra. Almost the first sign of both appears in Heron... An algebraic symbolism first appears in Diophantus, but the symbols are probably not Greek and probably are Egyptian. Both Heron and Diophantus were Alexandrians. This is all the evidence that trigonometry and algebra were of Egyptian origin, but does it not raise a shrewd suspicion? Proclus... speaks... as if Heron founded a school."