Count Like an Egyptian by Reimer David

Author:Reimer, David [Reimer David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2014-05-31T16:00:00+00:00

Now remove the ninth; in other words, subtract 2 from 18. The Egyptians would do this by completing 2 to 18.

The answer is 16.

All that’s left to do is to square this value, basically turning it into an area. So we need to square 16.

256 is the area of the circle.

That wasn’t so bad, but that’s just because we started with a number whose l was trivial. It should come as no surprise that this is the very example in Ahmose’s papyrus that first shows how to find the area of a circle. He used simple numbers to keep the focus on the method and not on the computation. We can test this approximation by using the modern equation πr2. Since the diameter is 18, the radius is 9 and π × 92 is roughly 254.47, which is a little over a half of 1 percent away from the Egyptian’s value of 256.

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