Delivered before the Imperial Academy of Sciences in Vienna in 1884, Emil Weyr’s Über die Geometrie der alten Aegypter surveys what the nineteenth century knew of Egyptian geometry: the rope-stretchers who re-drew field boundaries after each Nile flood, the arithmetic of the Rhind papyrus, and the practical mathematics behind pyramid and temple.
Weyr, one of Austria’s leading geometers, writes for a learned public with clarity and brevity — the lecture is short, elegant and dense with detail. Download the free EPUB, in the original German, for a fine specimen of Habsburg-era history of science.