2Integers
We have gone through formal mathematics of natural numbers. We exclude 0 from natural numbers for further working. We have already seen that both addition and multiplication are commutative and associative for natural numbers. Hence, terms can be rearranged and regrouped arbitrarily. Moreover, multiplication is distributive over addition.
2.1 Informal Introduction of Integers
Natural numbers have got limited subtraction capability. We shall use it to extend natural numbers to integers. Let us consider a trading activity. A person buys something at some price called purchase price and sells the same at some price called sales price. To keep computation limited to natural numbers, we shall consider the amounts involved in trade as whole ...
