Pyramids

One remarkable achievement of the Mayan people is their construction of pyramids.

And, when we talk about the technology of Mayan people, it is a romantic idea of many of us that the ability of building huge pyramids indicates extraordinary technological standard of the Mayan and ancient Egyptian people.

The very fact is, the remarkable part of raising an Egyptian pyramid in those days was related to the difficulty in the coordination of a huge team of worker, and in the limited availability of metallic tools. (In essence, copper was the best metal that ancient Egyptians had. To build the Great Pyramid, in addition to all the workers that you could imagine, there was an additional team of people who did nothing but kept sharpening the copper tools for the front line workers.) The construction of these gigantic buildings actually did not depend on sophisticated mathematical and scientific knowledge. A wide-based pointed-top building is, in a sense, easy to rise. All you need is an accurate method of measuring, and the ability to handle formula for the calculation of weights and volumes.

And these were, and only these were, exactly what ancient Egyptian mathematics could do. In fact, they had difficulty to work with decimal numerations, and, in spite of their remarkably accurate ability to make astronomical observations, the quality of their prediction was much inferior to the Babylonians.