Ahmes is the earliest known mathematician in history.  He was born about the year 1688 BC and died when he was 60 years old.  Ahmes was a scribe in ancient Egypt and was thought to have written the Rhind Papyrus.  This papyrus was named after the Alexander Henry Rhind, the Scottish Egyptologist who purchased the papyrus in 1858 and who discovered the importance of this paper.  The papyrus is also called the Ahmes papyrus in honor of Ahmes, even though he claimed that he was only a scribe, and not the author.  It is said that the mathematical techniques found in the papyrus dates back to about 2000 BC, when the techniques were first used.  The papyrus contains 85 problems written in Egyptian Hieroglyphs.  It is a good source of learning about Egyptian mathematics because it described the methods the Egyptians used to multiply and divide, "their employment of false position, their solution of the problem of finding the area of a circle, and many applications of mathematics to practical problems."  Little is known of any other work completed by Ahmes.  A quotation from the Rhind papyrus that was insightful to me and maybe insightful to other people dealing with any sort of problems is "Accurate reckoning: the entrance into knowledge of all existing things and all obscure secrets."

Author: Sergio Gonzalez

References:
http://www-groups.dcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/~history/Chronology/WhoWasThere.html

An Introduction to the History of Mathematics, 6th edition. Author: Howard Eves. Copyright 1990.