The ancient Egyptians had notation to represent the fraction 1/n, but not for every fraction of the form a/b. Because of this, they typically represented fractions as Egyptian fractions, which are finite sums of fractions of the form 1/
Nice post! For what it's worth the greedy algorithm is also applied to the knapsack problem. A nice introduction to that can be found in John Guttag's Introduction to Computation and Programming using Python.
Thanks for the comment and the recommendation. It seems from Wikipedia that “greedy algorithm” is an umbrella term that applies to a lot of different situations.
Excellent history too of ancient math! I never knew how such civilizations as ancient Egypt dealt with mathematics. Further posts on ancient understanding would be really interesting.
Nice post! For what it's worth the greedy algorithm is also applied to the knapsack problem. A nice introduction to that can be found in John Guttag's Introduction to Computation and Programming using Python.
Thanks for the comment and the recommendation. It seems from Wikipedia that “greedy algorithm” is an umbrella term that applies to a lot of different situations.
Excellent history too of ancient math! I never knew how such civilizations as ancient Egypt dealt with mathematics. Further posts on ancient understanding would be really interesting.
Thanks, Roger! A lot of this was new information to me too.