Ancient Egyptian mathematics is the mathematics that was developed and used in Ancient Egypt 3000 to c. , from the Old Kingdom of Egypt until roughly the beginning of Hellenistic Egypt. The ancient Egyptians utilized a numeral system for counting and solving written mathematical problems, often involving multiplication and fractions. Evidence for Egyptian mathematics is limited to a scarce amount of surviving sources written on papyrus. From these texts it is known that ancient Egyptians understood concepts of geometry, such as determining the surface area and volume of three-dimensional shapes useful for architectural engineering, and algebra, such as the false position method and quadratic equations.

Overview

Written evidence of the use of mathematics dates back to at least 3200 BC with the ivory labels found in Tomb U-j at Abydos. These labels appear to have been used as tags for grave goods and some are inscribed with numbers. Further evidence of the use of the base 10 number system can be found on the Narmer Macehead which depicts offerings of 400,000 oxen, 1,422,000 goats and 120,000 prisoners.

The evidence of the use of mathematics in the Old Kingdom (c. 2690–2180 BC) is scarce, but can be deduced from inscriptions on a wall near a mastaba in Meidum which gives guidelines for the slope of the mastaba. The lines in the diagram are spaced at a distance of one cubit and show the use of that unit of measurement.

The Moscow Mathematical Papyrus and Rhind Mathematical Papyrus are so called mathematical problem texts. They consist of a collection of problems with solutions. These texts may have been written by a teacher or a student engaged in solving typical mathematics problems. The Egyptians used some special notation for fractions such as , and and in some texts for , but other fractions were all written as unit fractions of the form or sums of such unit fractions. Scribes used tables to help them work with these fractions. The Egyptian Mathematical Leather Roll for instance is a table of unit fractions which are expressed as sums of other unit fractions. The Rhind Mathematical Papyrus and some of the other texts contain tables. These tables allowed the scribes to rewrite any fraction of the form as a sum of unit fractions.

  • The Egyptian Mathematical Leather Roll

Multiplication and division

Egyptian multiplication was done by a repeated doubling of the number to be multiplied (the multiplicand), and choosing which of the doublings to add together (essentially a form of binary arithmetic), a method that links to the Old Kingdom. The multiplicand was written next to figure 1; the multiplicand was then added to itself, and the result written next to the number 2. The process was continued until the doublings gave a number greater than half of the multiplier. Then the doubled numbers (1, 2, etc.) would be repeatedly subtracted from the multiplier to select which of the results of the existing calculations should be added together to create the answer.

==Geometry==<!-- This section is linked from History of geometry -->

thumb|center|600px|Image of Problem 14 from the [[Moscow Mathematical Papyrus. The problem includes a diagram indicating the dimensions of the truncated pyramid.]]

There are only a limited number of problems from ancient Egypt that concern geometry. Geometric problems appear in both the Moscow Mathematical Papyrus (MMP) and in the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus (RMP). The examples demonstrate that the Ancient Egyptians knew how to compute areas of several geometric shapes and the volumes of cylinders and pyramids.

  • Area:
  • Triangles: The scribes record problems computing the area of a triangle (RMP and MMP).
  • Circles: Problem 48 of the RMP compares the area of a circle (approximated by an octagon) and its circumscribing square. This problem's result is used in problem 50, where the scribe finds the area of a round field of diameter 9 khet.