The Egyptian Mathematics section is under construction.

This section is still under construction. As most of the webpages are independent, I am publishing them as I complete them. It is organized around the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus("RMP") and I hope to eventually cover all 84 problems and 3 tables - but that may take a while! Most of the pages other than the actual problems are complete. The problem page indicates which of the problems have content.

Even in its current state I am interested in your thoughts. Please send any feedback to chris.driscoll@mail.utoronto.ca. The References page provides more information on books about Egyptian Mathematics that may be of interest.

Purpose of this Part of the Website

There is very little information on Egyptian mathematics in general, and the RMP in particular, on the WWW. There are a number of good books available (see the references page), but they require a significant commitment of time to be of use.

This is a great pity, because Egyptian mathematics deserves to be better known. Its methods are very different from our own, and in some cases they compare favourably with them. They were used for thousands of years, and even the greatest ancient astronomer, Claudius Ptolemy(ca 170 AD), with all the tools of Greek and Babylonian mathematics available to him, used ancient Egyptian methods at various points in The Almagest.

The problems are very interesting and give us a flavour of the lives of scribes and other ancient Egyptians. Finally, because they are generally what we would regard as Elementary and High School problems in arithmetic, algebra and geometry, they are accessible to a wide audience, unlike much of The Almagest, which requires a serious background in geometry.

Furthermore, the actual contents of the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus("RMP"), which is our main source of information on Egyptian Mathematics, are very terse, quite cryptic, and non intuitive. I recall that my first reaction to looking at actual problems in the RMP was that "That is not at all what I expected from reading general descriptions of the problems". I think that it is very useful to expose the actual contents of the RMP to a wider audience.

So, not finding what I wanted, I decided to add a major section on the topic to my website.

With this website I hope to:

• make each of the 84 problems and 3 tables in the RMP accessible to modern audiences,
• give a flavour of the original layout and actual content of the RMP, and
• provide a very brief introduction to the core techniques of Egyptian Mathematics.

Introduction

This section of the website provides information about ancient Egyptian mathematics. It is built around the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus("RMP") which is our primary source of information on this subject. In addition to historical information, it provides detailed information on each of the problems contained in the RMP:

• The original problem in English translation.
• An explanation of the algorithm behind the problem
• The problem worked out in detail
• Comments about the problem.

We have very few examples of Egyptian mathematics, and the RMP contains almost all that exists. With the exception of two problems in the Moscow Mathematical Papyrus("MMP") all of the problems found in other documents duplicate material found in the RMP (Imhausen 2016, 65-69). Thus, examining the RMP in detail provides an excellent understanding of the Egyptian mathematics that we know. This raises an important point - we must not conflate what we know of Egyptian mathematics with what they knew of it. We need to remember that we may have nothing butthe equivalent of a couple of chapters of a single high school math textbook, so we must be very careful in drawing conclusions about what they knew, or did not know.

The ancient Egyptian approach to mathematics differed substantially from ours. As many of these differences will appear across many problems, they have been gathered together in the "Preliminaries" section. Topics covered include: Egyptian numbers, underlying techniques for halving and doubling number values, multiplication, division, fractions, units of measure, length and area.

The RMP contains three reference tables that assist in performing calculations with fractions and 84 worked problems. The bulk of the website will focus on these topics.

The site contains four small tools for working with Egyptian and Babylonian mathematics that I built a few years ago:

• Convert a number into hieroglyphics
• Convert a number into cuneiform and into its base₆₀ form
• Convert a number in base₆₀ to decimal form
• A simple four function calculator for base₆₀ numbers

Finally, the site contains an annotated bibliography of the sources that have been used in its preparation.