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    Babylonian and Egyptian Geometry-A Very Brief Overview

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    Ebn Misr
    Ancient Babylonian and Egyptian mathematicians were primarily concerned with arithmetic calculations and may not have viewed geometry as a separate field of mathematics. However, some examples of ancient geometry calculations for area and volume do still exist. One such example is from the Rhind Papyrus dating to around 1650 BCE, which calculates the area of a circular field by approximating pi as 256/81. It describes the mathematics verbally rather than symbolically and focuses on practical applications like field area rather than abstract geometry. Little explanation or proof is provided for the solutions, with more focus on following algorithms to solve problems.

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    Babylonian and Egyptian Geometry-A Very Brief Overview

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    Ebn Misr
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    Ancient Babylonian and Egyptian mathematicians were primarily concerned with arithmetic calculations and may not have viewed geometry as a separate field of mathematics. However, some examples of ancient geometry calculations for area and volume do still exist. One such example is from the Rhind Papyrus dating to around 1650 BCE, which calculates the area of a circular field by approximating pi as 256/81. It describes the mathematics verbally rather than symbolically and focuses on practical applications like field area rather than abstract geometry. Little explanation or proof is provided for the solutions, with more focus on following algorithms to solve problems.

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    Ancient Babylonian and Egyptian mathematicians were primarily concerned with arithmetic calculations and may not have viewed geometry as a separate field of mathematics. However, some examples of ancient geometry calculations for area and volume do still exist. One such example is from the Rhind Papyrus dating to around 1650 BCE, which calculates the area of a circular field by approximating pi as 256/81. It describes the mathematics verbally rather than symbolically and focuses on practical applications like field area rather than abstract geometry. Little explanation or proof is provided for the solutions, with more focus on following algorithms to solve problems.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    31 views1 page

    Babylonian and Egyptian Geometry-A Very Brief Overview

    Uploaded by

    Ebn Misr
    Ancient Babylonian and Egyptian mathematicians were primarily concerned with arithmetic calculations and may not have viewed geometry as a separate field of mathematics. However, some examples of ancient geometry calculations for area and volume do still exist. One such example is from the Rhind Papyrus dating to around 1650 BCE, which calculates the area of a circular field by approximating pi as 256/81. It describes the mathematics verbally rather than symbolically and focuses on practical applications like field area rather than abstract geometry. Little explanation or proof is provided for the solutions, with more focus on following algorithms to solve problems.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    of 1

    Babylonian and Egyptian geometry—a very brief overview

    Ancient Babylonian and Egyptian mathematicians seem to have been concerned primarily with arithmetic
    calculations, and probably didn’t regard geometry as a separate branch of mathematics. However, we do
    have a few extant examples of ancient geometry, mostly calculations of area and volume.
    Here is an excerpt1 from the Rhind Papyrus, an Egyptian mathematical text dated to approximately
    1650 BCE (though the writer said it was actually a transcription of another document from 200 years before
    that).

    Example of a round field of diameter 9 khet. What is its area? Take away 1/9 of the diameter, 1;
    the remainder is 8. Multiply 8 times 8; it makes 64. Therefore it contains 64 setat of land.

    Here are some features of this excerpt that are characteristic of ancient Babylonian and Egyptian math-
    ematics:

    • It’s pretty accurate. The relationship between area A and radius r is A = 64d2 /81 = (256/81)r2 ,
    which is equivalent to approximating π ≈ 256/81 = 3.16049 . . . . This is not bad at all, and would be
    perfectly fine for any applications the Egyptians used it for.
    • Mathematics is described verbally instead of symbolically. In modern notation, we can rewrite the
    relationship between area A and diameter d given in the excerpt as
    64 2
    A = (d − d/9)2 = d
    81
    but the Egyptians lacked the notational tools to do this (to be fair, Western mathematics didn’t come
    up with modern algebraic notation until the 1600s or so).2
    • In these cultures, mathematics was concerned with solving applied, practical problems. Rather than
    talking about the area of a circle, the problem talks about a “round field”. There is little, if any,
    geometric abstraction in extant Babylonian and Egyptian texts.
    • We have no idea what a “khet” or a “setat” is, but we can infer it from context; one setat is presumably
    one square khet. In particular, they had units of measurement.

    • The Babylonian and Egyptian writings tend not to include explanations (much less formal proofs).
    There’s more focus on how to solve a problem (by following an algorithm) than why the given solution
    works.

    Question to ponder. Imagine you are an ancient Babylonian. How might you have come up with this
    rule?
    More reading.
    • MacTutor: Babylonian mathematics

    • MacTutor: Egyptian mathematics

    1 Taken from Stahl, chapter 2, p. 1


    2 One wonders what elements of modern mathematics notation will become obsolete in a millennium or two.

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