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Ancient Egyptian mathematics is the mathematics that was developed and used in Ancient Egypt c. 3000 to c. 300 BCE, from the Old Kingdom of Egypt until roughly the beginning of Hellenistic Egypt. The ancient Egyptians utilized a numeral system for counting and solving written mathematical problems, often involving multiplication and fractions .
Another significant Egyptian mathematical text is the Moscow papyrus, also from the Middle Kingdom period, dated to c. 1890 BC. It consists of what are today called word problems or story problems, which were apparently intended as entertainment.
Ancient Egyptian mathematics also has examples of word problems. The Rhind Mathematical Papyrus includes a problem that can be translated as: There are seven houses; in each house there are seven cats; each cat kills seven mice; each mouse has eaten seven grains of barley; each grain would have produced seven hekat .
The topics covered in the book include the Egyptian numbering systems, in both spoken and written (hieroglyphic) form, arithmetic, Egyptian fractions, and systems of measurement, their lunar calendar, calculations of volumes of solids, and word problems involving the measurement of beer and grain.
Problems 35–38 involve divisions of the heqat, which is an ancient Egyptian unit of volume. Beginning at this point, assorted units of measurement become much more important throughout the remainder of the papyrus, and indeed a major consideration throughout the rest of the papyrus is dimensional analysis .
Ancient Egyptian algebra dealt mainly with linear equations while the Babylonians found these equations too elementary, and developed mathematics to a higher level than the Egyptians. [7] The Rhind Papyrus, also known as the Ahmes Papyrus, is an ancient Egyptian papyrus written c. 1650 BC by Ahmes, who transcribed it from an earlier work that ...
Construction of drainage canals reduced the problems of major flooding from entering homes and areas of crops; but because it was a hydraulic civilization, much of the water management was controlled in a systematic way. Glassworking Ancient Egyptian glassware in the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Egyptian fraction. An Egyptian fraction is a finite sum of distinct unit fractions, such as. That is, each fraction in the expression has a numerator equal to 1 and a denominator that is a positive integer, and all the denominators differ from each other. The value of an expression of this type is a positive rational number ; for instance the ...