how was fractions made?

Answer 1

They congealed in the terrible, collective nightmares of second grade math students everywhere.

Answer 2

Fractions were made in a similar way negative numbers were. Subtraction only makes sense if the first number is bigger than what you are taking away from it. You can take 3 from 5 and get 2, but you can't, for instance, take 5 from 3. Thus in order to make sense of things such as 3 minus 5, we made negative numbers.

Now, division only makes sense if the larger number is divisible by the smaller one. You can divide 15 into 3 groups, and each will have 5. However, you can't divide 7 into 5 groups. For similar reasons as above, fractions were introduced to make sense of this statement. Each group would have 7/5 items in it.

Answer 3

Well I ordered pizza a few weeks ago, and there were four of us around it, all hungry. I wanted to eat 1 pizza as usual, but my daughter said, Dad, if you eat 1 pizza then the rest of us are left with 1 minus 1 = 0 pizza. What are we going to do?

That's when my son, genius that he is, said Why don't we CUT the pizza into slices? But son, says I, that won't do. We have 1 pizza, how can 1 be separated into fract... wait a minute, you're on to something here... Pretty soon we were all chewing merrily away, me and my 3/8 of a pizza, my daughter and wife with 1/4 each, and my son with the remaining 1/8 (he likes to load up on French fries which are abundant, whole numbers of them).

And that's how my family invented fractions, a couple of weeks ago. I don't know how the world ever lived without them.

Answer 4

History of Fractiona

Click on the URL below for additional information concerning Fractions

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractions

members.aol.com/jeff570/fractions.html

archives.math.utk.edu/articles/atuyl/confrac/history

www.csun.edu/~hbund408/math history/math.htm

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Answer 5

Probably a Mesopotamian priest had to divide X amount of wheat by Y families.