Problems from Another Time

Individual problems from throughout mathematics history, as well as articles that include problem sets for students.

A woodcutter starts to fell a tree 4 feet in diameter, and cuts half way through. One face of the cut is horizontal, and the other face is inclined to the horizontal at an angle of 45 degrees. Find the volume of the wood cut out.
I found a stone but did not weigh it; after I added to it 1/7 of its weight and then 1/11 of this new weight, I weighed the total at 1 mina. What was the weight of the stone?
The authors recount the 'great tale' of Napier's and Burgi's parallel development of logarithms and urge you to use it in class.
A lady being asked how old she was at the time of her marriage replied that the age of her oldest son was 13; that he was born 2 years after her marriage...
A man agreed to pay for 13 valuable houses worth $5000 each, what the last would amount to, reckoning 7 cents for the first, 4 times 7 cents for the second, and so on, increasing the price 4 times on each to the last. A father left$20,000 to be divided among his four sons ages 6, 8, 10, and 12 years respectively so that each share placed at 4 1/2 compounded interest should amount to the same value when its possessor becomes the age 21.
How a translation of Peano's counterexample to the 'theorem' that a zero Wronskian implies linear dependence can help your differential equations students
There is a log 18 feet long, the diameter of the extremities being 1 ft and 2.6 ft respectively...
Given a right triangle where you know the length of the base and the sum of the perpendicular side and the hypotenuse.

If 40 oranges are worth 60 apples, and 75 apples are worth 7 dozen peaches, and 100 peaches are worth 1 box of grapes and three boxes of grapes are worth 40 pounds of pecans, how many peaches can be bought for 100 oranges?