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 ...
Math, ping.
I thought the point of that problem was how to read the question. One was going to St. Ives.
FWIW, the St. Ives conundrum isn’t a numbers problem, it is a logic problem.
One.
You are correct and Pam Belluck needs to go back and read the question again.
You are correct and Pam Belluck needs to go back and read the question again.
—
Since it is a question of logic, not numbers, Pam (A NYT reporter) misses it completely as logic escapes liberals, and numbers are talking points.
She probably also didn’t read the Egyptian one either - which may be a logic problem also.
As you say it is a conundrum. However, the answer is indeterminate as it is not clear whether the man he met was also going to St. Ives or somewhere else. Perhaps the term “met” can be interpreted that they were going in opposite directions but, again, maybe not.
That is true also. But, it isn’t a math problem. It is a logic problem.
You can’t tell which way the crowd of wives and cats are going from the riddle. They could just as easily have been going to St. Ives also, because it is pretty easy to catch up to people who are trying to carry around a total of 392 cats and kittens each. Having a single bag with two cats in it would slow down your trip enough.
Which makes it a problem in semantics.
In the same class as the riddle “If a tree falls in the forest and there’s nobody to hear it, does it make a sound?”
The Ahmes scroll had 84 problems and their solutions.
“A heap and it's 1/7th part become 19.” for example. The solution suggested was “regula falsa” assuming a (likely) wrong answer and ‘correcting’. Today we would use algebra.
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One caravan leaves Memphis, headed south at 3 miles per hour. A man riding a camel leaves Kerma headed north at 7 miles an hour...
So, Jemian, what is the logical conclusion you reached? I agree with Erasmus.
I have been performing that transaction pretty much as a daily ritual.
If only you and dead people can read hex, how many people can read hex?
Why? It is redundant. Regardless works just fine. Irrespective is what most people mean anyway. Do you also say "each and every"? A lot of people do but it is also redundant. "Each" works fine by itself as does "every." There is no need to combine them.
First you said it was a logic problem and I asked you for the logical conclusion. In stead of an answer you now say it is a philosophical problem rather than one of semantics. So, it what way is it a philosophical subject.
I at first agreed with Erasmus but I now retract that. There is simply not enough information there for it to be anything but a conundrum.
Conundrum applies specifically to a riddle phrased as a question, the answer to which usually involves a pun or a play on words, such as “What is black and white and read all over?”; conundrum can also refer to any puzzling or difficult situation.
My head just exploded.
I thought you were refering to the tree problem and not the St. Ives problem.
I’ll get back to you with a better explanation of my thinking later. Be prepared for a capitulation. However, before I do that, I have to try to recreate my thinking and that can be challenging at times.
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