Hana Vymazalová

Hana Vymazalová, born 1978, is a Czech Egyptologist. She is considered to have significantly contributed to further understand the Akhmim Wooden Tablet's arithmetic.

The first scholar to unscramble the Akhmim Wooden Tablet's arithmetic was G. Daressy, who published in 1906 the Akhmim Wooden Tablet's text line by line, garbling two division problems. Daressy correctly reported three hekat divisions: divisors 3, 7, and 10. Daressy improperly reported scribal divisors 11, and 13 facts. In retrospect, typographical errors had been introduced.

All five hekat unity divisions remained an unresolved issue until corrected in 2002 by Hana Vymazalová, who was, at the time, a Charles University, Prague, graduate student. Vymazalova published the five Akhmim Wooden Tablet's hekat division problems by correcting Daressy's two 1906 errors. Her paper proved that all five two-part answers were returned to a hekat unity. Vymazalova did not suggest an abstract context. Yet, she shows that the Akhmim Wooden Tablet scribe, and other Modern Kingdom scribes, recorded binary quotients, and scaled Egyptian fraction remainders, in an innovative manner. [ [http://planetmath.org/encyclopedia/RemainderArithmetic.html PlanetMath: remainder arithmetic ] ]

Some consider that honouring Hana Vymazalová's 2002 discovery of a hekat unity equalling (1 = 64/64) is required, in as much as her work has opened a major door to scribal remainder arithmetic, as large sections of previously hard to Middle Kingdom mathematical texts can now be easily decoded and fully translated into modern base 10 decimal notation. [ [http://historyofegyptianfractions.blogspot.com/ History of Egyptian Fractions ] ]

References

External links

* Planet Math, Remainder Arithmetic, http://planetmath.org/encyclopedia/RemainderArithmetic.html
* History of Egyptian Fractions, http://historyofegyptianfractions.blogspot.com/
* Czech Institute of Egyptology, http://egyptologie.ff.cuni.cz/