Math sl IA – 7

Math IA: Egyptian Fractions

Introduction

Have you ever seen an eye of Horus? As one of the IB art students doing Art higher level, I was highly interested in a painting of ‘eye of Horus’. The painting compelled me to further look up its history, and as a result, I could learn interesting facts embedded in the eye of Horus.

As you can see from the diagram above, each section of the painting represents different unit fractions. And more interestingly, if you add up all unit fractions represented in the painting you could get a value of 63/64, which is slightly less than 1. Egyptian believed that the remaining part, 1/64 to represent 1 is restored by God Thoth.

It is undeniable that the concept of a unit fraction, which is also presented as an Egyptian Fraction, fully intrigued me into the world of fraction. The lacking 1/64 in the eye of Horus made me wonder ‘If I want to represent 1 by adding up different Egyptian fractions, what kinds of Egyptian fractions do I have to use?’

And I also considered about ‘Is there a pattern I can find when choosing Egyptian fractions for the adding up process?’