I’m looking into building some real Egyptian-style arithmetic into our School of Tomorrow curriculum, perhaps transliterated into Python. I explain more of my rationale on Synergeo and places.
From my outbox (fixed a typo):
Anyway, where your scholarship might come in
handy is: while we're exploring an Egyptian
aesthetic, we don't neglect some actual Egyptian
maths. Let's take the opportunity to explore their
civilization.
You probably know of Ralph Abraham, UCSB, whom
I met at a workshop in the 1990s, here in Oregon, at
a Math Summit at Oregon State. Sir Roger Penrose,
Ian Stewart... other big names were there. Ralph's
keynote was about a curriculum wherein students
take history seriously and study maths along an
abbreviated timeline, as if in a natural history
museum, only coming to our own maths and civ
through this lengthy, twisty turny tunnel we
call "the story of humans in Universe" (I remember
such a timeline exhibit at the Parliament of World
Religions I attended, with my family, in Cape Town,
1999, sponsored by Hewlett-Packard if I'm not
mistaken).
Remember, we often study Midhat Gazale’s Number and Gnomon.
In the meantime, the technical literature feels pretty opaque to me so far.
Here’s a sample from this morning’s inbox:
Longer rconstructions are suggested to reconnect aspects of Egyptian fraction division from 1202 CE to 1925 BCE as inverted to proposed 3,100-year older multiplication origins. Intermediate 300 BCE Greek (Archimedes) quotient and remainder square root approximations of the upper and lower limits of pi, decoded from a Byzantine text, were exposed by a three step inverse proportion method in 2012. The method was adopted by Arabs, Fibonacci and Galileo. The older second step apparently was used by Babylonians and/or Egyptians inverted division to multiplication. An implied third step, accuracy level, may have been trivial, and therefore was not required by Greeks, Arabs, Fibonacci and Galileo in scribal shorthand data.
