"Nature abhors a vacuum" or Horror vacui was challenged by this mathematician and engineer from Alexandria whose work represents what type of scientific tradition?
Horror vacui (physics) In physics, horror vacui, or plenism, is commonly stated as "Nature abhors a vacuum." It is a postulate attributed to Aristotle, who articulated a belief, later criticized by the atomism of Epicurus and Lucretius, that nature contains no vacuums because the denser surrounding material continuum would immediately fill the rarity of an incipient void. He also argued against the void in a more abstract sense (as "separable"), for example, that by definition a void, itself, is nothing, and following Plato, nothing cannot rightly be said to exist. Furthermore, in so far as it would be featureless, it could neither be encountered by the senses, nor could its supposition lend additional explanatory power. Hero of Alexandria challenged the theory in the first century CE, but his attempts to create an artificial vacuum failed. The theory was debated in the context of 17th-century fluid mechanics, by Thomas Hobbes and Robert Boyle, among others, and through the early 18th century by Sir Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz.
R. Catesby Taliaferro Robert Catesby Taliaferro (1907–1989) was an American mathematician, philosopher, and translator of ancient Greek and Latin works into English. An Episcopalian from an old Virginia family, he taught in the mathematics department of the University of Notre Dame. He translated Ptolemy's "Almagest", a 2nd-century book on astronomy, the 13 books of Euclid's "Elements", Apollonius' works on conic sections, and some works of Plato, and St. Augustine. He contributed a celebrated foreword to the Bollingen Series 1944 reprint of the Thomas Taylor translation of Plato's Timaeus and Critias. He also wrote a book titled "The concept of matter in Descartes and Leibniz" and one titled "Number systems, introduction to Euclid book V, and to the theory of limits".