Egyptian Mathematical Leather Roll
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Egyptian Mathematical Leather Roll
The Egyptian Mathematical Leather Roll (EMLR) is a 10 × 17 in (25 × 43 cm) leather roll purchased by Alexander Henry Rhind in 1858. It was sent to the British Museum in 1864, along with the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus, but it was not chemically softened and unrolled until 1927 (Scott, Hall 1927). The writing consists of Middle Kingdom hieratic characters written right to left. Scholars date the EMLR to the 17th century BCE.Clagett, Marshall. Ancient Egyptian Science: A Source Book. Volume 3: Ancient Egyptian Mathematics. Memoirs of the American Philosophical Society 232. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1999, pp. 17–18, 25, 37–38, 255–257 Mathematical content This leather roll is an aid for computing Egyptian fractions. It contains 26 sums of unit fractions which equal another unit fraction. The sums appear in two columns, and are followed by two more columns which contain exactly the same sums.Annette Imha ...
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British Museum
The British Museum is a public museum dedicated to human history, art and culture located in the Bloomsbury area of London. Its permanent collection of eight million works is among the largest and most comprehensive in existence. It documents the story of human culture from its beginnings to the present.Among the national museums in London, sculpture and decorative and applied art are in the Victoria and Albert Museum; the British Museum houses earlier art, non-Western art, prints and drawings. The National Gallery holds the national collection of Western European art to about 1900, while art of the 20th century on is at Tate Modern. Tate Britain holds British Art from 1500 onwards. Books, manuscripts and many works on paper are in the British Library. There are significant overlaps between the coverage of the various collections. The British Museum was the first public national museum to cover all fields of knowledge. The museum was established in 1753, largely b ...
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Wilbur Knorr
Wilbur Richard Knorr (August 29, 1945 – March 18, 1997) was an American historian of mathematics and a professor in the departments of philosophy and classics at Stanford University. He has been called "one of the most profound and certainly the most provocative historian of Greek mathematics" of the 20th century. Biography Knorr was born August 29, 1945, in Richmond Hill, Queens. He did his undergraduate studies at Harvard University from 1963 to 1966 and stayed there for his Ph.D., which he received in 1973 under the supervision of John Emery Murdoch and G. E. L. Owen... After postdoctoral studies at Cambridge University, he taught at Brooklyn College, but lost his position when the college's Downtown Brooklyn campus was closed as part of New York's mid-1970s fiscal crisis. After taking a temporary position at the Institute for Advanced Study, he joined the Stanford faculty as an assistant professor in 1979, was tenured there in 1983, and was promoted to full professor in 199 ...
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Mathematics Manuscripts
Mathematics is an area of knowledge that includes the topics of numbers, formulas and related structures, shapes and the spaces in which they are contained, and quantities and their changes. These topics are represented in modern mathematics with the major subdisciplines of number theory, algebra, geometry, and analysis, respectively. There is no general consensus among mathematicians about a common definition for their academic discipline. Most mathematical activity involves the discovery of properties of abstract objects and the use of pure reason to prove them. These objects consist of either abstractions from nature orin modern mathematicsentities that are stipulated to have certain properties, called axioms. A ''proof'' consists of a succession of applications of deductive rules to already established results. These results include previously proved theorems, axioms, andin case of abstraction from naturesome basic properties that are considered true starting points of t ...
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Ancient Egyptian Texts
Ancient Egyptian literature was written in the Egyptian language from ancient Egypt's pharaonic period until the end of Roman domination. It represents the oldest corpus of Egyptian literature. Along with Sumerian literature, it is considered the world's earliest literature. Writing in ancient Egypt—both hieroglyphic and hieratic—first appeared in the late 4th millennium BC during the late phase of predynastic Egypt. By the Old Kingdom (26th century BC to 22nd century BC), literary works included funerary texts, epistles and letters, hymns and poems, and commemorative Autobiography, autobiographical texts recounting the careers of prominent administrative officials. It was not until the early Middle Kingdom of Egypt, Middle Kingdom (21st century BC to 17th century BC) that a narrative Egyptian literature was created. This was a "media revolution" which, according to Richard B. Parkinson, was the result of the rise of an intellectual class of scribes, new cultural sensi ...
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Egyptian Fractions
An Egyptian fraction is a finite sum of distinct unit fractions, such as \frac+\frac+\frac. 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 \tfrac; for instance the Egyptian fraction above sums to \tfrac. Every positive rational number can be represented by an Egyptian fraction. Sums of this type, and similar sums also including \tfrac and \tfrac as summands, were used as a serious notation for rational numbers by the ancient Egyptians, and continued to be used by other civilizations into medieval times. In modern mathematical notation, Egyptian fractions have been superseded by vulgar fractions and decimal notation. However, Egyptian fractions continue to be an object of study in modern number theory and recreational mathematics, as well as in modern historical studies of ancient mathematics. Appl ...
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Battiscombe Gunn
Battiscombe George "Jack" Gunn, (30 June 1883 – 27 February 1950) was an English Egyptologist and philologist. He published his first translation from Egyptian in 1906. He translated inscriptions for many important excavations and sites, including Fayum, Saqqara, Amarna, Giza and Luxor (including Tutankhamun). He was curator at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo and at the University Museum at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. In 1934 he was appointed Professor of Egyptology at the University of Oxford, a chair he held until his death in 1950. Early life and background Gunn was born in London, the son of George Gunn, a member of the London Stock Exchange, and Julia Alice Philp. His paternal grandparents were Theophilus Miller Gunn FRCS, a prominent London surgeon originally from Chard, and Mary Dally Battiscombe, from Bridport. Theophilus's father was John Gunn, a non-conformist preacher, brother of Daniel Gunn, originally from Wick in Scotland, but who spent ...
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Liber Abaci
''Liber Abaci'' (also spelled as ''Liber Abbaci''; "The Book of Calculation") is a historic 1202 Latin manuscript on arithmetic by Leonardo of Pisa, posthumously known as Fibonacci. ''Liber Abaci'' was among the first Western books to describe the Hindu–Arabic numeral system and to use symbols resembling modern "Arabic numerals". By addressing the applications of both commercial tradesmen and mathematicians, it promoted the superiority of the system, and the use of these glyphs. Although the book's title has also been translated as "The Book of the Abacus", writes that this is an error: the intent of the book is to describe methods of doing calculations without aid of an abacus, and as confirms, for centuries after its publication the algorismists (followers of the style of calculation demonstrated in ''Liber Abaci'') remained in conflict with the abacists (traditionalists who continued to use the abacus in conjunction with Roman numerals). The historian of mathematics Carl ...
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Reisner Papyrus
The Reisner Papyri date to the reign of Senusret I, who was king of ancient Egypt in the 19th century BCE. The documents were discovered by G.A. Reisner during excavations in 1901–04 in Naga ed-Deir in southern Egypt. A total of four papyrus rolls were found in a wooden coffin in a tomb.Clagett, Marshall Ancient Egyptian Science, A Source Book. Volume Three: Ancient Egyptian Mathematics (Memoirs of the American Philosophical Society) American Philosophical Society. 1999 Katz, Victor J. (editor), Imhausen, Annette et.al. The Mathematics of Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, India, and Islam: A Sourcebook, Princeton University Press. 2007, p 40 - 44, * The Reisner I Papyrus is about 3.5 meters long and 31.6 cm wide in total. It consists of nine separate sheets and includes records of building construction with numbers of workers needed, carpentry workshops, dockyard workshops with lists of tools. Some segments contain calculations used in construction. The sections of the document w ...
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Moscow Mathematical Papyrus
The Moscow Mathematical Papyrus, also named the Golenishchev Mathematical Papyrus after its first non-Egyptian owner, Egyptologist Vladimir Golenishchev, is an ancient Egyptian mathematical papyrus containing several problems in arithmetic, geometry, and algebra. Golenishchev bought the papyrus in 1892 or 1893 in Thebes. It later entered the collection of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow, where it remains today. Based on the palaeography and orthography of the hieratic text, the text was most likely written down in the 13th Dynasty and based on older material probably dating to the Twelfth Dynasty of Egypt, roughly 1850 BC.Clagett, Marshall. 1999. Ancient Egyptian Science: A Source Book. Volume 3: Ancient Egyptian Mathematics. Memoirs of the American Philosophical Society 232. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society. Approximately 5½ m (18 ft) long and varying between wide, its format was divided by the Soviet Orientalist Vasily Vasilievich Stru ...
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Berlin Papyrus 6619
The Berlin Papyrus 6619, simply called the Berlin Papyrus when the context makes it clear, is one of the primary sources of ancient Egyptian mathematics. One of the two mathematics problems on the Papyrus may suggest that the ancient Egyptians knew the Pythagorean theorem. Description, dating, and provenance The Berlin Papyrus 6619 is an ancient Egyptian papyrus document from the Middle Kingdom, second half of the 12th (c. 1990–1800 BC) or 13th Dynasty (c. 1800 BC – 1649 BC). The two readable fragments were published by Hans Schack-Schackenburg in 1900 and 1902. Connection to the Pythagorean theorem The Berlin Papyrus contains two problems, the first stated as "the area of a square of 100 is equal to that of two smaller squares. The side of one is ½ + ¼ the side of the other."Richard J. Gillings, ''Mathematics in the Time of the Pharaohs'', Dover, New York, 1982, 161. The interest in the question may suggest some knowledge of the Pythagorean theorem, though the papyrus ...
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Akhmim Wooden Tablet
The Akhmim wooden tablets, also known as the Cairo wooden tablets (Cairo Cat. 25367 and 25368), are two wooden writing tablets from ancient Egypt, solving arithmetical problems. They each measure around and are covered with plaster. The tablets are inscribed on both sides. The hieroglyphic inscriptions on the first tablet include a list of servants, which is followed by a mathematical text. T. Eric Peet, ''The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology'', Vol. 9, No. 1/2 (April 1923), pp. 91–95, Egypt Exploration Society The text is dated to year 38 (it was at first thought to be from year 28) of an otherwise unnamed king's reign. The general dating to the early Egyptian Middle Kingdom combined with the high regnal year suggests that the tablets may date to the reign of the 12th Dynasty pharaoh Senusret I, c. 1950 BC. The second tablet also lists several servants and contains further mathematical texts. The tablets are currently housed at the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities in Cairo. The tex ...
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