/sci/ - Science & Math

So. Egyptian fractions, not very advanced stuff. Historical interest. Having set the stage, let us recapitulate the CONTENTS of the Rhind papyrus.

The AUTHOR of the text is one Egyptian scribe by the name of Ahmose (or Ahmes), as he identifies himself (along with a pharoah or two) in the TITLE PAGE.

This is followed by a table that does the following: take 2, divide it by all the odd numbers from 3-101, and then convert those fractions into some (arbitrary!) Egyptian fractions, showing work in each case. This is known as the "2/N TABLE", and I don't feel like going into detail on it, so here's a simple link of this part of the text instead, with what was done:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhind_Mathematical_Papyrus_2/n_table

This is followed again by a much shorter "1-9/10 TABLE" which gives particular Egyptian fractions for each of 1/10 ... 9/10. I haven't checked yet but I would imagine that both of these tables set the stage for the

PROBLEMS. According to Chace, I've come up with a total of 91 problems; these will be the focus of the remainder of my treatment. As for Chace's treatment, they are numbered as 1-87 inclusive, along with four additional items noted as 7B, 59B, 61B, and 82B. Note that this may vary slighly from wiki's treatment of the overall text (my library book is literally 90 years old. Conventions may have changed since then.)

And that's the Rhind Papyrus, in a nutshell.

Pic related is a nice look at the Chace treatment of the Egyptian, which isn't really what I"m interested in. He has relatively modern transliterations of the problems, which is where I'll spend the rest of my time. I reserve the right to summarize what's being done in even more modern terms.