Henry Rhind purchased the 10″ × 17″ leather roll in 1858. It was sent to the British Museum in 1864, but was not chemically softened and unrolled until 1927 (Scott and Hall 1927).
Middle Kingdom hieratic characters were written right to left. There are 26 rational numbers listed. Each rational number is followed by a series of equivalent unit fractions.
There are ten binary rational numbers: 1/2, 1/4 (twice), 1/8 (thrice), 1/16 (twice), 1/32, and 1/64. There are seven other even rational numbers: 1/6 (twice – but wrong once), 1/10, 1/12, 1/14, 1/20, and 1/30. Finally, there are nine odd rational numbers: 2/3, 1/3 (twice), 1/5, 1/7, 1/9, 1/11, 1/13, and 1/15.
The British Museum examiners found no introduction or description of how and why the equivalent unit fraction series were computed (Gillings 1981: 456–457). A series of equivalent unit fractions is associated with the fractions 1/3, 1/4, 1/8, and 1/16. There is a trivial error associated with the unit fraction series total of...
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Gardner, M. (2008). Mathematics in Egypt: Mathematical Leather Roll. In: Selin, H. (eds) Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-4425-0_9369
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