The article 'Surveying in Egypt' talks about the two ways in which surveys took place in Ancient Egypt. We talked during our class about some of the ways Ancient Egyptians measured their fields to report losses and taxes, which was confirmed in the article. It was surprising to me that the methods ancient Egyptian employed to measure distances were so sophisticated that these methods are still used in today's time. I had not comprehended before taking this course how mathematically advanced some civilizations were.
While reading this article, I wondered how did ancient Egyptians keep track of the cubit system to measure in a wide population? Surely, different people must have had different lengths of their forearms and fingers. Secondly, the article mentions that less is understood about how ancient Egyptians understood angles and which tools they used to measure angles and yet, one of the ways they created a right angle was with the help of two equilateral triangles. So, I wonder how they managed to get this far without the tools needed. Perhaps they did have the tools and we haven't been able to uncover them yet.
Good points, Manveen! It's indeed fascinating to see how mathematically advanced some civilizations were. Your comment makes me think about how little we focus on the humanities in math education, even for people like ourselves who enjoy math. I also did not learn about any of these until graduate school,. Teaching history in math can potentially help us appreciate math more and enrich the curriculum for our students.
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