- Babylonians:
- Mayans:
There weren't any particular questions, but folks wanted some examples. So I asked student Austin for a random 5-digit number, and we used both Babylonian and Mayan systems to write the number.
Here's the board work, for the number 73,502.
We got through only one example (more to come). But the focus was on tying Egyptian multiplication to the binary decomposition. The thing that makes Egyptian multiplication is the Fraudini trick, essentially; that, and the fact that they understood how to double things.
You might check out the Zoom video of today's class to see my highlights of this little history of a western understanding of Egyptian Mathematics. A couple of key points:
- The Egyptians wrote on papyrus, so they could write out long problems; the Babylonians were working in clay, so they have only small tablets (which would have been too heavy if large, and dried before one could put too much information on them).
- The Egyptian hieroglyphics were only deciphered relatively recently (a couple hundred years ago). We haven't know for too long what the Egyptians actually knew.
