Egyptian Division and Multiplication



As it can be seen from the posts, Egyptians would have had a very difficult time trying to divide 101 by  10. Since they would have had to kept on getting smaller and smaller fractions. They had access to unit fractions, so they could have found out that 10 fits into 101, 10 times and the remainder of 1 could be represented as 1/10, but just by changing the number to 102, it gets more complicated since they would have had to find way to represent 1/5 using by sum of unit fractions with different denominators. Either way, they could not have arrived at the solution by dividing by 2, so it definitely was not an efficient method. Also previous to trying to divide by 101 by 10, I tried to divide by 101 by 11 instead and as soon as the whole numbers part was finished, it ran into problem of 11/2 which they would not have had access to, so the method does not work very well with odd numbers as divisors.  


 

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