1.1 What Are Numbers?

The Rational Numbers

We have lots of kinds of numbers but they all start with the natural numbers, which are 1, 2,
31,2,3, and so on.

If you count your figures and toes, you will come to 2020 (most of you will), and that is a
natural number. We can, in our imagination, consider that these natural numbers go on forever,
past a million, a billion, a trillion, and so on.

In elementary school you studied not only these numbers, but how you can perform operations
on them.

What operations?

There are addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.

You can add two natural numbers together, and you will always get another natural number, as
in the famous fact that one and one are two.

Subtraction, on the other hand, is trickier. If you subtract a number, for example the number 55,
from itself, you get something new, something that is not a natural number at all. We call it the
number 00 or zero. And if you subtract a number, again say 55, from a smaller number, say 33,
then you get something else that is new, namely a negative integer, which in this case is -2−2,
called "minus two".

You can use numbers to count the number of pennies you have in your pocket. Thus you might
have five pennies in your pocket. Zero is the number of pennies you would have if your pocket
had a hole in it, and all those you put in immediately fell out again.

Now suppose you go to a store, and the storekeeper is foolish enough to give you credit. Suppose
further that you had five pennies, and you bought some expensive item costing 11 pennies. Then
the negative integer, -6−6, represents the fact that not only do you have no pennies but if you
got six more, you would be obligated to surrender them to pay for this item. Six here is the
number of pennies you would owe your creditor, if you were to pay him your 55 pennies and he
gave you the object, and lent you the rest of the money.

So to accommodate subtraction, and to be able to represent "amount owed" by numbers, we

extend the natural numbers to include the numbers 00 and the negatives of the natural numbers.
This entire set of numbers, positive natural numbers, their negatives and 0 is called the set
of integers, and is denoted by the letter ZZ.

We can take any two members of ZZ and add them or subtract them and in either case get
another member of ZZ.
I know all that, but I am very rusty on actual additions and subtractions. I get them wrong
much of the time I try to do them.

Most people will make a mistake roughly once in any ten additions or subtractions of single
digits that they perform. This means that if they add or subtract numbers having many digits,
like 12341231234123 and 54321215432121 they stand an excellent chance of getting the
wrong answer.

Fortunately that is of no significance today. You can easily check additions and subtractions on a
calculator or on a spreadsheet, and see if you get the same answer several different times.
Unfortunately I usually make an error in keying in the numbers to add or subtract, or add instead
of subtract or do something else equally absurd. All that means today is that I must do every
calculation at least three times, to have a reasonable chance of correctness. True the amount of
my effort is triple what it might be, but three times very little effort is still very little effort.

If you have this problem you will be best off adding or subtracting on a spreadsheet. Then you
can look at your computation and use your judgment as to whether it makes sense. Here are some
rules for checking for sense.

When you add positive numbers the result should be bigger than both of the
two "summands" that you added. If one of the numbers is positive and one is negative, the
magnitude (the value if you ignore any minus sign) of the sum should be smaller than the
magnitude of the larger of the two, and the sign should be that of the summand with the larger
magnitude.

Also, the least significant digits of your numbers should add or subtract correctly, if you ignore
the rest. For example, if you subtract 431431 from 512512 then the last digit of the answer
had better be 11 which is 22 minus 11.

If your checking produces something suspicious, try your computation again, being more careful,
particularly with the input data.

The operation of subtracting 5 from another number, undoes the operation of adding 55 to

another number. Thus, if you do both operations, add five and then subtract five, or vice versa,
you are back where you started from: 3 + 5 - 5 = 33+5−5=3.

Adding 55 and subtracting 55 are said to be inverse operations to one another, because of this

property: Performing them one after the other is equivalent to doing nothing.

By the way, why isn’t 00 a natural number?

I have no idea. That’s the way people defined natural numbers long ago, and nobody has cared
much for changing that definition.
Back in elementary school you also encountered the notion of multiplication. This is something
you can do to two integers which will produce a third one called their product. You were (I
hope) forced to learn a multiplication table which gives the product of each pair of single digit
numbers and then learned how to use this table to multiply numbers with more digits.

I was never very good at this .

In olden days you had to be able to do these things, additions and multiplications, if only to be
able to handle money and to perform ordinary purchases without being swindled.

Now you can use a calculator or computer spreadsheet to do these things, if you know how to
enter integers and to push the ++ or -− or *∗ and = buttons as appropriate.

( Unfortunately this fact has led pedagogues to believe they do not have to force pupils to go
through the drudgery of learning the multiplication table.

This does much harm to those who don't bother to do so, because of the way our brains function.
It turns out that the more time we spend on any activity as children, and even as adults, the
bigger the area of the brain gets that is devoted to that activity, and the bigger it gets, the better
we get at that activity.

Thus, your spending less time learning the multiplication table has the effect of reducing the
area of your brain devoted to calculation, which impedes your further mathematical
development.

Your skill at mathematics will be directly proportional to the amount of time you choose to
devote to thinking about it. And that is up to you. )

Once we are acquainted with multiplication, a natural question is: how can we undo
multiplication? What is the inverse operation, say to multiplying by 55, so that multiplying and
then doing it is the same as doing nothing? This operation is called division. So you learned how
to divide integers. The inverse operation to multiplying by xx is dividing by xx,
(unless xx is 00).

Now here comes a problem: if we try to divide 55 by 33 we do not get an integer. So, just as we
had to extend the natural numbers to integers to accommodate the operation of subtraction, we
have to extend our numbers from integers to include also ratios of integers , like \frac{5}
{3}35, if we want to make division well defined for every pair of non-zero integers. And we
want to be able to define division wherever we can.

Ratios of integers are called rational numbers, and you get one for any pairs of integers, so long
as the second integer, called the denominator, is not zero. Ratios like \frac{5}{3}35 which are
not themselves integers are called fractions.
Once we have introduced fractions, we want to provide rules for adding and subtracting them
and for multiplying and dividing them. These start to get complicated, but fortunately for us, we
have calculators and spreadsheets that can do these things without complaining at all if we have
the wit to enter what we want done.

There is one thing we cannot do with our rational numbers, and that is to divide by 00. Division,
after all, is the action of undoing multiplication. But multiplying any number by 0 gives
result 00. There is no way to get back from this 00 product what you multiplied 00 by to get it.

Of course adding and multiplying (and subtracting and dividing) fractions is more complicated
than doing so for integers. To multiply say \frac{a}{b}ba times \frac{c}{d}dc, the new
numerator is the product of the old ones (namely acac) and the new denominator is the product
of the old ones (bdbd), so the product is \frac{ac}{bd}bdac: \frac{a}{b}*\frac{c}{d}
= \frac{ac}{bd}ba∗dc=bdac.

The inverse operation of multiplying by \frac{c}{d}dc is multiplying by \frac{d}{c}cd, and

that inverse is by definition the operation of dividing by \frac{c}{d}dc. The product of any
number and its inverse is always 11. This means that \frac{d}{d}dd is always 11 for
any dd other than 00.

Thus \frac{a}{b}ba divided by \frac{c}{d}dc is \frac{a}{b}ba multiplied by the inverse

of \frac{c}{d}dc which is \frac{a}{b}ba multiplied by \frac{d}{c}cd. The answer
is \frac{ad}{bc}bcad.

Adding is a bit trickier. The notion of addition can be applied to objects as well as to numbers, in
the following sense. We know, for example, that 3+53+5 is 88. That means that if we have 3
radishes and dig up 55 more, we will have 88 radishes (assuming nobody has eaten the
first 33). And the same is true for any other objects in place of radishes. This tells us how to add
fractions that have the same denominator. Thus \frac{3}{a} + \frac{5}{a}a3
+a5 is \frac{8}{a}a8 in which \frac{1}{a}a1 has replaced a radish. We are applying the
general rule for addition of like things to the object \frac{1}{a}a1.

To add fractions with different denominators you must first change them so that the
denominators are the same, then add the numerators like you were adding numbers. The easiest
way to do this is to make the new denominator the product of the old ones. Thus to
find \frac{a}{b} + \frac{c}{d}ba+dc you first multiply the first term by \frac{d}{d}dd,
and the second by \frac{b}{b}bb, getting \frac{ad}{bd} + \frac{cb}{bd}bdad+bdcb and
the answer is \frac{ad+cb}{bd}bdad+cb. You can do the same sort of thing for subtraction.

You were probably forced to factor out common terms in the numerator and denominator in that
answer in school, but you don’t have to do that in entering the answer in a spreadsheet, which
makes addition of fractions much easier when you use spreadsheets.