Video: Who Invented Fractions?

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Fractions were invented more than likely by the Egyptians to organize taxes on land. Find out who invented fractions with tips from a mathematics instructor in this free video on math history.

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Video Transcript

Hi. I'm Steve Jones, and I'm going to talk a little bit about who invented fractions and who first used them. What we do know is that 4,000 years ago around 2000 B.C. in Egypt, fractions were used to describe taxes. So when a piece of land was taxed or an area was taxed, it was divided into sections, and each section was taxed according to a certain amount. If you had two sections, you paid twice as much tax as if you had one section; three sections, three times as much, and so on. So the fractions, the proportions that you were paying depended on how many pieces of land you had. This was a very efficient method, because you didn't know how much anything was going to produce. The same idea was used in England in the 1550s, very much for profits of voyages for ships going abroad. Somebody would buy into a voyage. They'd pay a sum of money. And they'd buy a fraction of the profits. So when the ship returned, the profits were added up and were divided into fractions, and each fraction was given to each person who'd paid that amount of money. So sometimes, one person would have a fraction of a half of the profits or maybe a quarter of the profits or an eighth or a sixteenth or a thirty-second. But it was all done on fractions, because with fractions, you didn't have to say how much money the trip was going to make. If it made a lot of money, the fraction was bigger. If it was making just a smaller amount of profit, the fraction was smaller; a very efficient system.

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Who Invented Fractions?

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