Many are familiar with the old and amusing puzzle “As I was going to St. Ives, I met a man with seven wives…” Recently scholars examining the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus (c. 1650 BCE) were started to find a surprisingly similar version: 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. (One hekat was roughly 1.3 gallons.) So how many total items are described? Answer: 19,607.
The Rhind papyrus, which dates to 1650 B.C., is one of several papyri exhibiting ancient Egypt’s mathematical skills in the form of puzzles. Some give formulas for calculating the volume of a pyramid and a cylinder, and one even gives a very early formula for calculating the area of a circle, using a surprisingly accurate of pi, namely 256/81 (approx. 3.16049).
Marcel Danesi, an anthropology professor at the University of Toronto, noting that people of all eras and cultures have posed puzzles, declares that making puzzles is “the most ancient of all instincts.” He calls documents like the Rhind papyrus “the first puzzle books in history.”
The Egyptian puzzles were more than just entertainment. The scribe, a scholar named Ahmes, introduced his collection of 85 puzzle problems as the “correct method of reckoning, for grasping the meaning of things and knowing everything that is, obscurities and all secrets.”
Another ancient papyrus, known as the Moscow papyrus (1850 BCE), has 25 puzzle-problems. These include problems to find the surface area of a hemisphere and the area of planar triangles.
Additional details are given in a very readable article by Pam Belluck in today’s New York Times, from the above post was based and excerpted [Belluck2010].
References
- Pam Belluck, “Math Puzzles’ Oldest Ancestors Took Form on Egyptian Papyrus,” New York Times, 6 Dec 2010, available at Online article.