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- 2.1 Egyptian Multiplication
- 2.2 Improving the Algorithm
- 2.3 Thoughts on the Chapter
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This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
2.3 Thoughts on the Chapter
Students of elementary algebra learn how to keep transforming expressions until they can be simplified. In our successive implementations of the Egyptian multiplication algorithm, we’ve gone through an analogous process, rearranging the code to make it clearer and more efficient. Every programmer needs to get in the habit of trying code transformations until the final form is obtained.
We’ve seen how mathematics emerged in ancient Egypt, and how it gave us the first known algorithm. We’re going to return to that algorithm and expand on it quite a bit later in the book. But for now we’re going to move ahead more than a thousand years and take a look at some mathematical discoveries from ancient Greece.
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