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Ancient Greek Mathematics: Scribes Used Diagrams to Solve Problems

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Ancient Greek Mathematics: Scribes Used Diagrams to Solve Problems

The Rhind Mathematical Papyrus, the best-known surviving mathematical text from ancient Egypt

A scribe in Roman Egypt needs the area of a field. He reaches for a reed pen, sketches a rough triangle on papyrus and writes numbers along its sides. A new study argues that scruffy sketch was not decoration, but the place where the mathematics actually happened. Thomas Kelly, a classicist at the University of Cambridge, has built the first full catalogue of these drawings and concluded they worked as scratch paper, memory aid and answer key all at once.

The original papyrus fragment from Vienna

The original papyrus fragment from Vienna. The damaged ink lines belong to a diagram for finding the volume of a square-based pyramid. (Kelly, T. Historia Mathematica, 2026)

A Gap Filled After a Century of Scattered Sketches

Kelly examined ten Greek papyri carrying geometry problems, dating from the first to the fourth century AD. Between them they preserve triangles, circles, quadrilaterals and solid forms including pyramids, cylinders and cuboids. Some hold a single problem; one, a fourth-century teaching codex known as P. Math, holds 38. The drawings had never been gathered in one place, because the papyri sit in collections from Vienna to Chicago and earlier editors treated the sketches in very different ways. Kelly redrew each diagram and annotated every one, publishing the results in the journal Historia Mathematica.

Gary Manners

www.Ancient-Origins.net – Reconstructing the story of humanity’s past


Source: https://www.ancient-origins.net/news-history-archaeology/ancient-greek-mathematics-00103246


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