As I Was Going to St Ives

As I Was Going to St Ives is one of the best known English nursery rhymes. He is a mystery poem dar. The text reads:

A free German translation reads:

The rhyme is only apparently a mathematical puzzle is because only the speaker went to St. Ives; Men, Women, bags and cats met him on the way there. It remains unclear which target this group has. Usually it is assumed that it meets the speaker or moving neither towards St. Ives still in the opposite direction. The speaker meets a man, seven women, 49 sacks and improbable 343 cats and kittens in 2401, a total of 2801 people, animals, and textiles.

The rhyme is first detected in 1730, but a similar mathematical problem already appears in ancient Egyptian Rhind Papyrus ( c. 1650 BC).