Re: [HM] practicality of Egyptian fractions

Milo Gardner (milo.gardner@24stex.com)
Thu, 26 Aug 99 08:07:58 -0700

Bjorn Smested's suggestion that ancient Egyptians like
to serve 2/5th of a loaf bread in units of 1/3 + 1/15
based on eating the smaller piece first, and saving the
large unit for later is humorous. Egyptians could have
done that, but I doubt if Egyptian exact statements of
rational numbers n/p and n/pq (as our base 10 decimals
can not state) were primarily constructed for that purpose.

I see the central purpose of eliminating round off error,
a modern trend that our modern decimal system even
accepts in our computer. To the ancient, the question
may have been:

Which class of business activities/transactions can
be made exactly, and which ones can not be, and therefor
must be rounded off?

The former was written in Egyptian fractions, such as
all inheritance transactions, a very issue to Egyptians.
The later would have used the Horus-Eye form, where
the infinite series 1 = 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + 1/16 + 1/32 + 1/64 + ...
would have been truncated at the first 5-terms.

Regards to all,

Milo Gardner