In ancient Egypt, the main benefit of using unit fractions could be when dividing resources, people could visually see and understand the equality of the distribution. Also, using unit fractions allowed them to develop notation that represents 1/n in general, so it would be convenient in writing.
Ancient Egyptian fractions inspired the greedy algorithm in contemporary math. The most significant benefit is that this approach separates irrational fractions into unit fractions (that could be rational or irrational). Therefore, people could have a better understanding of irrational fractions.

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