In fact, Egyptian civilization was bad for math in more ways than one; it was not just the absence of a zero that caused future difficulties. The Egyptians had an extremely cumbersome way of handling fractions. They didn’t think of 3/4 as a ratio of three to four as we do today; they saw it as the sum of 1/2 and 1/4. With the sole exception of 2/3, all Egyptian fractions were written as a sum of numbers in the form of 1/n (where n is a counting number)—the so-called unit fractions. Long chains of these unit fractions made ratios extremely difficult to handle
