Unfortunately, we have little written record of the Egyptians’ mathematical knowledge. Only two mathematical documents survived from this period. The one we are concerned with is called the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus, named after the 19th-century Scottish collector who bought it in Egypt. It is a document from about 1650 BC written by a scribe named Ahmes, which contains a series of arithmetic and geometry problems, together with some tables for computation. This scroll contains the first recorded algorithm, a technique for fast multiplication, along with a second one for fast division. Let’s begin by looking at the fast multiplication algorithm, which (as we shall see later in the book) is still an important computational technique today.