The so-called "papyrus" is a reed-like plant that grows in the Nile Valley. The ancient Egyptians tore off the stems of this plant, flattened them, dried them, and made them together for paper. They use some kind of pigment as ink, wood strips or reed stalks as pens to record things on papyrus. This papyrus later became the common paper in ancient Mediterranean, and was used by Greeks, Romans and later Arabs.
Moscow papyrus was written by an anonymous author from the 12 dynasty in Egypt. Written around 1850 BC, it recorded 25 questions written in the language of Egyptian monks, but it lacked the frontispiece, so the title was unknown. The volume is about 18 feet long and 3 feet wide. In 1930, the draft is published together with its editorial notes. In addition to some simple arithmetic and area calculation, several quadratic equations are solved by proportional method, and the volume formula of quadrangular prism is included. This formula did not appear in other countries until 1000 years later, so it was praised as "the greatest pyramid" by mathematical historians. 1893 was acquired by Russian collector Gorini soff, so it was called Gorini soff cursive script. 19 12 was transferred to Moscow Museum. The book was studied by Tulayev and Strovey of the Soviet Union and published in 1930.
1858, the Scottish antique dealer Rand bought a batch of papyrus documents in a small town near the Nile, all of which were mathematical documents, and were called Rand papyrus. Because the author of Rand papyrus is Amos, it is also called Amos papyrus, which is now in the British Museum. Rand papyrus is a long strip, written about 1650 BC. The original mathematical text above has the nature of a practical manual, which is 544 cm long and 33 cm wide. There are many hieroglyphics written on it, and there are 85 solutions to practical math exercises. There are symbols of decimal mathematics in arithmetic, application problems of fractional calculation, etc. There are linear equations, geometric series and so on in algebra. There is an approximate value of pi (3. 1604), the area of triangle, the volume of sphere, etc. Rand papyrus was published in 1927. It is about 18 feet long and about 1 foot wide. When this cursive script arrived at the British Museum, it was not as long as before and was divided into two pieces-in fact, the middle piece had been lost. About four years after buying papyrus in Rand, American Egyptian scientist Smith bought a papyrus in Egypt on 1906-he bought it as medical papyrus, and later, Smith handed it over to the new york Historical Society; There, antique collectors found that it was a patchwork and deceptive thing, and the lost Amos papyrus was covered under those deceptive things. The association then handed the scroll to the British Museum, which made Amos's work complete.
Rand papyrus is the main source of studying ancient Egyptian mathematics, and its content is very rich. Described are: Egypt's multiplication and division method, the usage of Egypt's unit fraction, the trial and error method, the solution to the problem of finding the area of a circle and the application of mathematics in many practical problems.
Rowling's cursive script was written around BC 1350, and now it is kept in the Louvre Museum, which contains some elaborate food records. The above figures show that a large number of figures were actually used at that time.
Harris Papyrus in BC 1 167 was a document prepared by Ramesses IV for his accession to the throne, which praised the great achievements of his father Ramses III. The rest of this papyrus is a list of temple property, which provides us with the best example of real records of ancient Egypt.