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Egyptian Fractions (2023)

The Egyptians wrote fractions as a sum of unit fractions of the form 1/n. Why? How is it a better system than ours? How can we change our fractions into Egyptian fractions? These are answered on this page, designed for school-age students and others interested in the fun side of number play.

After his death at the age of 30, the scroll found its way to the British Museum in London in 1864 and remained there ever since, being referred to as the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus(or RMP for short). Since early civilisations would need to predict the start of spring accurately in order to sow seeds, then a large part of such mathematical writing has applications in astronomy. In Mordell's Diophantine Equations published by Academic Press in 1969, he showed that we can reduce the unknown (unproven) cases to just those prime denominators n which have a remainder of 1, 11 2, 13 2, 17 2, 19 2 or 23 2 when divided by 840 (see A139665).

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