I’ve heard things like the integers form a ‘ring’ while natural numbers do not, but I don’t quite understand what they *are*.
In: Mathematics
A set you can do “arithmetic” with: there’s adding, subtracting, and multiplying (and they “play nice” together, i.e. distributive law).
It doesn’t require division because a ring is meant to capture the essence of what makes something a “number system” and, like in the integers, division doesn’t always work. The natural numbers are missing the subtraction requirement.
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