Welcome to Maths For Fun – where mathematical curiosity meets pure enjoyment for learners of all ages! Founded by a team of lifelong maths enthusiasts, we believe that numbers aren’t just for tests – they’re for exploration, discovery, and delight. Whether you’re eight or eighty, a beginner or a seasoned problem solver, you’ll find a growing collection of logic based games and puzzles that cover every corner of mathematics.
The World’s Oldest Maths Puzzle - The Riddle of the Seven Houses of Grain
Long before algebra, calculators, or even written equations, people were already puzzling over numbers. Around 1650 BCE, in the time of the pharaohs, an Egyptian scribe named Ahmes copied a mathematical riddle onto papyrus. This document – now known as the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus – contains dozens of problems involving fractions, geometry, and trade. Among them lies what many believe to be the world’s oldest surviving maths puzzle.
It’s a word problem that could easily appear in a modern classroom, and it goes like this:
The Puzzle
“There are seven houses. In each house, there are seven cats. Each cat kills seven mice. Each mouse would have eaten seven ears of grain. Each ear of grain would have produced seven hekat of grain.”
The challenge is to find the total amount of grain that would have been saved by the cats.
At first glance, it’s just a story – a problem about houses, cats, and grain. But beneath the surface, it’s an early example of geometric progression: numbers multiplying through repeated patterns.
How to Solve
The Egyptians didn’t use modern notation like exponents or parentheses, but the logic is exactly the same. Let’s go step-by-step in their spirit – slow, visual, and practical.
Start with one house:
Each house has 7 cats.
Each cat kills 7 mice → 7 × 7 = 49 mice.
Each mouse would have eaten 7 ears of grain → 49 × 7 = 343 ears.
Each ear would have produced 7 hekat of grain → 343 × 7 = 2,401 hekat.
So, one house saves 2,401 hekat of grain.
Now scale it up:
There are seven houses, each doing the same.2,401 × 7 = 16,807 hekat of grain in total.
This problem isn’t just clever – it’s revolutionary. It shows that ancient Egyptians already understood repeated multiplication (what we now call powers or exponents) thousands of years before modern notation was invented.
It also shows how mathematics was woven into daily life: cats protecting grain, grain feeding people, and scribes measuring success in logical steps. The Egyptians weren’t calculating for fun – they were using maths to model the economy, storage, and sustainability.
Even more fascinating is that this same mathematical structure – 7⁵ = 16,807 – would later appear in Greek, Babylonian, and Indian mathematical traditions, proving that pattern-based reasoning is truly timeless.
If you’d like to explore the pattern, try changing the number base.
What if there were 5 houses instead of 7?
What if each animal ate 3 instead of 7?
You’ll find the structure remains the same: repetition builds exponential growth – or, in this case, exponential saving!
So, the world’s oldest maths puzzle isn’t just a relic – it’s a reminder that curiosity, storytelling, and numbers have always gone hand in hand.