Math Puzzles’ Oldest Ancestors Took Form on Egyptian Papyrus

[Judi Lynn]

Math Puzzles’ Oldest Ancestors Took Form on Egyptian Papyrus
By PAM BELLUCK
Published: December 6, 2010

“As I was going to St. Ives

I met a man with seven wives. ...”

You may know this singsong quiz,

But what you might not know is this:

That it began with ancient Egypt’s

Early math-filled manuscripts.

It’s true. That very British-sounding St. Ives conundrum (the one where the seven wives each have seven sacks containing seven cats who each have seven kits, and you have to figure out how many are going to St. Ives) has a decidedly archaic antecedent.

An Egyptian document more than 3,600 years old, the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus, contains a puzzle of sevens that bears an uncanny likeness to the St. Ives riddle. It has mice and barley, not wives and sacks, but the gist is similar. Seven houses have seven cats that each eat seven mice that each eat seven grains of barley. Each barley grain would have produced seven hekat of grain. (A hekat was a unit of volume, roughly 1.3 gallons.)

The goal: to determine how many things are described. The answer: 19,607.

The Rhind papyrus, which dates to 1650 B.C., is one of several precocious papyri and other artifacts displaying Egyptian mathematical ingenuity. There is the Moscow Mathematical Papyrus (held at the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow), the Egyptian Mathematical Leather Roll (which along with the Rhind papyrus is housed at the British Museum) and the Akhmim Wooden Tablets (at the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities in Cairo).

More:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/07/science/07first.html?_r=1&ref=world

[Skittles]

1. AWESOME read!

:thumbsup:

[Ian David]

2. Here's a photo...

Wow, they had Family Circus back then!

[eppur_se_muova]

3. But the answer's not the same at all!

"As **I** was going to St. Ives ..."

So how many were going to St. Ives? One!

[bleever]

4. Which the article's author failed to note.

Gold star for you.

[eppur_se_muova]

8. Well, I read the answer in Pogo's "Mother Goosery Rinds" ...

The rhyme was also featured in a Pogo comic story, "More Mother Goosery Rinds" in which Albert Alligator himself portrays Mother Goose and Pogo a traveling musician. After going over several Mother Goose rhymes they get to the St. Ives riddle, albeit replacing "seven" with "forty" and while Albert (Mother Goose) keeps trying to cogitate the answer, Pogo boasts he knows it...and he answers "one", which baffles "Mother Goose" (Albert Alligator). Pogo says that if the kits, cats, sacks and wives weren't going to St. Ives, maybe they were going somewhere else, such as Altoona, Pennsylvania. So Albert again recites the riddle, this time ending with "Kits, cats, sacks, wives, how many were going to...ALTOONA??" But by this time, Pogo has already gone upon his way.

(from Wikipedia)

[pokerfan]

5. another fragment has been translated

[enuegii]

6. Oops! My cat jumped up and clicked the mouse on 'reply'

and now the bastard's got nothing to say!

[pokerfan]

7. Yeah, my cat once bought 100 shares of Palm Computing that way

Stupid Charles Schwab hot keys.... Then the little bastard DK'd me when it was time to settle up and I wound up covering his loss! He just sat there licking himself like, "Who me?" x(

Cats and online trading do not mix.