Posted on 12/08/2010 5:21:59 AM PST by Palter
“As I was going to St. Ives I met a man with seven wives..”
You may know this singsong quiz,
But what you might not know is this:
That it began with ancient Egypt’s
Early math-filled manuscripts.
It’s true. That very British-sounding St. Ives conundrum (the one where the seven wives each have seven sacks containing seven cats who each have seven kits, and you have to figure out how many are going to St. Ives) has a decidedly archaic antecedent.
An Egyptian document more than 3,600 years old, the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus, contains a puzzle of sevens that bears an uncanny likeness to the St. Ives riddle.It has mice and barley, not wives and sacks, but the gist is similar. Seven houses have seven cats that each eat seven mice that each eat seven grains of barley. Each barley grain would have produced seven hekat of grain.(A hekat was a unit of volume, roughly 1.3 gallons.)
The goal: to determine how many things are described. The answer:19,607.
The Rhind papyrus, which dates to 1650 B.C., is one of several precocious papyri and other artifacts displaying Egyptian mathematical ingenuity. There is the Moscow Mathematical Papyrus (held at the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow), the Egyptian Mathematical Leather Roll (which along with the Rhind papyrus is housed at the British Museum) and the Akhmim Wooden Tablets(at the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities in Cairo).
They include methods of measuring a ship’s mast and rudder, calculating the volume of cylinders and truncated pyramids, dividing grain quantities into fractions and verifying how much bread to exchange for beer. They even compute a circle’s area using an early approximation of pi. (They use 256/81, about 3.16, instead of pi’s value of 3.14159..)
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
I was watching a TV show last night, on the NatGeo channel I think, and it discussed a new law enforcement interviewing concept call Cognitive Reenactment. It helped witnesses and victims do exactly that - reexamine their thinking to the point of including all their senses in their recollections of the event. You may be on the leading edge here. :-)
Ahhh, but in accordance with modern physics, we must ask, “If a tree falls in the forest and there’s nobody to observe it, is there really a tree?”
SILENCE! I DO NOT ALLOW YOU TO RETRACT THAT!
All seriousness aside, I consider the St Ives problem also to be based on semantics, because the natural meaning of the question statement, both implied by the riddler and meant to be taken by the riddlee, is that the others met by the traveler were going his way.
Even though the riddle can be posed with a Zen-like pedagogical intent, it's still a classic form of trick question.
1
2,802
2
0
Sounds like a Brother Dave Gardner fan.
I now agree with Semantic as what he says was part of my original consideration and the reason I settled on Conundrum. Just because the man he met had 7's there is no indication they were with him at the time. So, that leaves the 1, 2, 2802 possibilities but, Semantic, I don't see the 0. After all, the narrator says he was on his way to St. Ives, making at least 1 a given.
Actually, Steve Allen, who helped to make me into the mass of aberrations I am today.
I got 16,807 (7*7*7*7*7) for the Egyptian House Question. How did she come up with 19,607?
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