1/22/12 2.1 What Are Numbers?

The Rational Numbers

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2.1 Wha Ae Nmbe? The Raional Nmbe
We have lots oI kinds oI numbers but they all start with the natural numbers, which are 1, 2, 3, and so on.
II you count your Iigures and toes, you will come to 20 (most oI you will), and that is a natural number. We can, in
our imagination, consider that these natural numbers go on Iorever, past a million, a billion, a trillion, and so on.
In elementary school you studied not only these numbers, but how you can perIorm operations on them.
What operations?
There is addition, subtraction, multiplication and division (and perhaps also uglification and derision according to
Lewis Carroll who was a well known mathematician).
You can add two natural numbers together, and you will always get another natural number, as in the Iamous Iact that
one and one are two.
Subtraction, on the other hand, is trickier. II you subtract a number, Ior example the number 5, Irom itselI, you get
something new, something that is not a natural number at all. We call it the number 0 or zero. And iI you subtract a
number, again say 5, Irom a smaller number, say 3, then you get something else that is new, namely a negative integer,
which in this case is -2, called "minus two".
You can use numbers to count the number oI pennies you have in your pocket. Thus you might have Iive pennies in
your pocket. Zero is the number oI pennies you would have iI your pocket had a hole in it, and all those you put in
immediately Iell out again.
Now suppose you go to a store, and the storekeeper is Ioolish enough to give you credit. Suppose Iurther that you had
Iive pennies, and you bought some expensive item costing 11 pennies. Then the negative integer, -6, represents the Iact
that not only do you have no pennies but iI you got six more, you would be obligated to surrender them to pay Ior this
item. Six here is the number oI pennies you would owe your creditor, iI you were to pay him your 5 pennies and he
gave you the object, and lent you the rest oI 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 0 and the negatives oI the natural numbers. This entire set oI numbers, positive natural
numbers, their negatives and 0 is called the set oI integers, and is denoted by the letter Z.
We can take any two members oI Z and add them or subtract them and in either case get another member oI Z.
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 oI single digits that they perIorm.
This means that iI they add or subtract numbers having many digits, like 1234123 and 5432121 they stand an excellent
chance oI getting the wrong answer.
Fortunately that is oI no signiIicance today. You can easily check additions and subtractions on a calculator or on a
spreadsheet, and see iI you get the same answer several diIIerent times. UnIortunately I usually make an error in keying
in the numbers to add or subtract, or add instead oI 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 oI correctness. True the amount oI
my eIIort is triple what it might be, but three times very little eIIort is still very little eIIort.
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II you have this problem you will be best oII 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 Ior checking Ior sense.
When you add positive numbers the result should be bigger than both oI the two "summands" that you added. II one
oI the numbers is positive and one is negative, the magnitude (the value iI you ignore any minus sign) oI the sum
should be smaller than the magnitude oI the larger oI the two, and the sign should be that oI the summand with the
larger magnitude.
Also, the least signiIicant digits oI your numbers should add or subtract correctly, iI you ignore the rest. For example,
iI you subtract 431 Irom 512 then the last digit oI the answer had better be 1 which is 2 minus 1.
II your checking produces something suspicious, try your computation again, being more careIul, particularly with the
input data.
The operation oI subtracting 5 Irom another number, undoes the operation oI adding 5 to another number. Thus, iI
you do both operations, add Iive and then subtract Iive, or vice versa, you are back where you started Irom: 3 5 - 5
3.
Adding 5 and subtracting 5 are said to be inverse operations to one another, because oI this property: Performing
them one after the other is equivalent to doing nothing.
Back in elementary school you also encountered the notion oI multiplication. This is something you can do to two
integers which will produce a third one called their product. You were (I hope) Iorced to learn a multiplication table
which gives the product oI each pair oI single digit numbers and then learned how to use this table to multiply numbers
with more digits.
I was never ver good at this.
In olden days you had to be able to do these things, additions and multiplications, iI only to be able to handle money and
to perIorm ordinary purchases without being swindled.
Now you can use a calculator or computer spreadsheet to do these things, iI you know how to enter integers and to
push the or - or * and buttons as appropriate.
(Unfortunatel this fact has led pedagogues to believe the do not have to force pupils to go through the drudger of
learning the multiplication table.
This does much harm to those who don't bother to do so, because of the wa our brains function. It turns out that the
more time we spend on an activit as children, and even as adults, the bigger the area of the brain gets that is devoted
to that activit, and the bigger it gets, the better we get at that activit.
Thus, our spending less time learning the multiplication table has the effect of reducing the area of our brain
devoted to calculation, which impedes our further mathematical development.
Your skill at mathematics will be directl proportional to the amount of time ou choose to devote to thinking about it.
And that is up to ou.)
Once we are acquainted with multiplication, a natural question is: how can we undo multiplication? What is the inverse
operation, say to multiplying by 5, 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.
Now here comes a problem: iI we try to divide 5 by 3 we do not get an integer. So, just as we had to extend the natural
numbers to integers to accommodate the operation oI subtraction, we have to extend our numbers Irom integers to
include also ratios oI integers, like , iI we want to make division well deIined Ior every pair oI non-zero integers. And
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we want to be able to define division wherever we can.
Ratios of integers are called rational numbers, and ou get one for an pairs of integers, so long as the second integer,
called the denominator, is not ero. Ratios like 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 multipling and
dividing them. These start to get complicated, but fortunatel 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 b 0. Division, after all, is the action of
undoing multiplication. But multipling an number b 0 gives result 0. There is no wa to get back from this 0
product what ou multiplied 0 b to get it.
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