Böcker av Peter S. Rudman

Discussing ancient mathematics, this work digs deeper into the question of why it was done in a particular way. Why did the Egyptians use a bizarre method of expressing fractions? Why did Babylonians use an awkward number system based on multiples of 60? It answers such questions, arguing that some mathematical thinking is universal and timeless.

Explores the history of mathematics among the Babylonians and Egyptians, showing how their scribes in the era from 2000 to 1600 BCE used visualisations of how plane geometric figures could be partitioned into squares, rectangles, and right triangles to invent geometric algebra, even solving problems that we now do by quadratic algebra.