/sci/ - Science & Math

This completes my exposition of the Rhind papyrus. Thank you for your kind attention, ladies and gentlemen. I had a few loose ends I wasn't happy with in my own derivations so I may go back over the thread later and add a bit, but the thread's purpose has been effectively completed.

What did we learn?

-A single document, being a sample size of one, is not a good starting point for a statistical analysis. We have very few mathematical documents from ancient Egypt. However, the sheer scale of Rhind by itself is on a par with a modern textbook, and contains enough information that, now that we've been through it, we can draw some conclusions, or at least form informed opinions of the period.

-Ancient Egyptians (the literate elite, anyway) were indeed preoccupied with practical everyday-tier problems, and didn't do much abstraction. The most abstract results in the text are possibly 61B >>8034331 and 79 >>8037321 , although the latter has some novelty value. Still, I agree just a little with Chace that Egyptians "did math for its own sake" insofar as they related it to their religion and culture.The Horus-Eye fractions clearly fascinated Ahmose.

-Literate Egyptians were competent at manipulating fractions and properly performing unit conversions, which is better than can be said for many literate moderns.

-Ahmose and his sources had a nice approximation procedure for pi, for situations involving circles. The error of <1% did not seem to be of interest, but they could have pushed the argument since they were clearly capable of correctly adding tiny fractions ad nauseum viz. 31 >>8028777

-The whole text also gives me a flavor for primordial beginnings of linear algebra, but over half such cases ultimately reduce to linear equations.

-Ahmose sucked at geometry, or at least his source did, and yet interestingly, the pyramid-seked problems immediately suggest primordial beginnings of trigonometry. Not Euclid, but important, primordial beginnings of our activity.