lobo-hotei Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Rick Baudé Wrote:
> --------------------------------------------------
> -----
> > Well after all of these years of listening to
> 'pi'
> > and 'phi'. I've drifted first to one side
> then
> > the other until finally I'm dead in the
> middle.
> > That was until I showed my more
> mathematically
> > competent son than I am "The Ostracon" and
> told
> > him that it was made at the dawn of the
> pyramid
> > age. His eyes widened as he looked at it in
> > amazement, and he said, that somebody was
> trying
> > solve a problem that could only be done by
> > integration, one of the bedrock operations
> of
> > calculus. It appears that the AE's were
> solidly
> > on the road to calculus. So since we have
> only one
> > ostracon with one problem I think that the
> AE's
> > were far more advanced in mathematics than we
> give
> > them credit for. Just some food for thought.
>
> >
>
> Was this based solely on his view of the ostracon
> or history behind it?
>
> In other words did he assume someone was trying to
> find a volume/area measurement under the
> arc/circle/ellipse or that someone was trying to
> lay out an arc/segment for correct repeatability?
>

He assumed nothing, I just showed him the pix of the ostracon, and asked him what he thought of it. His eyes widened when he saw it and he said that somebody was definitely stumbling around integration but missed it. He then read the translation of the glyphs and said "Yep." they were definitely fumbling around integration, but if they had drawn a line at the top of the column that would have given the area of a square leaving a small triangle behind to be integrated into the solution then they would have been will on their way to integration.