Chapter 2

Numbers

Bear with me if you find some of the beginning stuff too easy. Years of bitter experience have shown that at least some of your classmates could use some brushing up at the most elementary level. You can ease yourself in at the appropriate level somewhere as we go along.

2.1 Integers

Don’t laugh even if we start out in First Grade! We begin with the counting numbers: image, also known as natural numbers. Zero came a little later, sometime during the Middle Ages. The integers comprise the collection of natural numbers, their corresponding negative numbers, and zero. We can represent these compactly as the set . The mathematician Kronecker ...

Get Guide to Essential Math, 2nd Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.