Abstract
Some people, including me, find learning a foreign language a real challenge; one of the reasons being the inconsistent rules associated with its syntax. For example, why is a table feminine in French, “la table”, and a bed masculine, “le lit”? They both have four legs! The rules governing natural language are continuously being changed by each generation, whereas mathematics appears to be logical and consistent. The reason for this consistency is due to the rules associated with numbers and the way they are combined together and manipulated at an abstract level. Such rules, or axioms, generally make our life easy, however, as we saw with the invention of negative numbers, extra rules have to be introduced, such as “two negatives make a positive”, which is easily remembered. However, as we explore mathematics, we discover all sorts of inconsistencies, such as there is no real value associated with the square-root of a negative number. It’s forbidden to divide a number by zero. Zero divided by zero gives inconsistent results. Nevertheless, such conditions are easy to recognise and avoided. At least in mathematics, we don’t have to worry about masculine and feminine numbers!.
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© 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
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Vince, J. (2015). Algebra. In: Foundation Mathematics for Computer Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21437-5_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21437-5_3
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