I just want to precise what really happened in the story, in case some are left wondering:

There was no way to partition the 17 camels as described, without having non-integer parts of camels... To (wisely) avoid that, the wise man changed the partitionning a bit (in the end, each son got a different amount of camels than they should have had, but they all got live camels, which is a win). The wise man made sure that he added whatever camels were needed to ensure a integer division among the sons, and took those back in the end.

Ie, the sons never received "1/2" "1/3" and "1/9" of 17 camels, but instead received the 1/2th, 1/3th and 1/9th of 18 camels, which amounted to only 17 camels (as 1/2, 1/3 and 1/9 is equal to 9/18+6/18+2/18 = 17/18. The wise man just represented the remaining 1/18th part with his camel.)