Professor Stewart's Hoard of Mathematical Treasures (14 page)
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Authors: Ian Stewart
Tags: #Mathematics, #General
BOOK: Professor Stewart's Hoard of Mathematical Treasures
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Historically, different cultures handled fractions in different ways. The ancient Egyptians had a very unusual approach to fractions; in fact, they had
three
unusual approaches.
three
unusual approaches.
First, they had special hieroglyphs for
and
and
Hieroglyphs for
and
andSecond, they used various portions of the Eye of Horus, or Wadjet Eye, to represent 1 divided by the first six powers of 2.
Wadjet Eye (left), and fraction hieroglyphs derived from it (right).
Finally, they devised symbols for fractions of the form ‘one over something’, that is,
,
,
,
, and so on. Today we call these
unit fractions. The unit fraction 1/n was represented by placing a cushion-shaped hieroglyph (normally representing the letter R) over the top of the symbols for n.
,,,, and so on. Today we call theseunit fractions. The unit fraction 1/n was represented by placing a cushion-shaped hieroglyph (normally representing the letter R) over the top of the symbols for n.
Hieroglyphs for 1/1,237
(in practice the Egyptians wouldn’t have used such big numbers in a unit fraction).
However, these methods dealt only with special types of fractions, and 6 divided by 7 was still a problem. So the Egyptians expressed all other fractions as sums of distinct unit fractions, for instance
and
It’s not at all clear why they didn’t like to write
as
+
, but they didn’t.
as+, but they didn’t.Other books
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