The Ancient Egyptian Rhind Papyrus dates back to around 1550 BC and is full of mathematical ideas and puzzles. Not surprisingly, it has a section about calculating the slopes of pyramids.

I particularly like that it opens with the statement: “Directions for Attaining the Knowledge of All Dark Things”. That’s quite a way to describe mathematics.

The papyrus has a great deal about “Egyptian fractions”, which means that every fraction has to be described in terms of other fractions which have the numerator 1.

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