The Development of Arithmetic: Part 2* By Anantanarayanan Thyagaraja Renaissance thinkers had the idea of inventing extensions of the Natural Numbers. The answer to, “what number added to 2 gives 6?” is in: u+2=6; u=4 [u for “unknown”]. A similar equation, u+6=4, is “insoluble” if we only had 0,1,2,3,..to play with. Some ancient genius…
Number, Form, Motion, Chance: The Four Pillars of Natural Philosophy
