Mathematics grows through the development and study of new concepts.

The
history of numbers illustrates this growth. Ancient cultures began mathematics
by counting, keeping tallies. In the ancient Near East an increasingly urban
economy the need to keep records, at first by the use of tokens, small clay
objects, to correspond to quantities of goods. Sometime around 3100 B.C. ancient
accountants began abstracting quantity from the objects being counted, and
written numbers were born (see Schmandt-Besserat (1993)). Oncethenatural
numbers,1,2,3,...were available, manipulatingthem and solving problems
involving numbers led to positive fractions, known to the ancient Babylonians
(2000 B.C.), who also knew some square roots and cube roots. The classical
Greek geometers (400 B.C.) studied positive quantities that could be obtained
from natural numbers by the processes of addition, subtraction, multiplication,
division, and taking squareroots. The number0 didnotcomeintouse, however, until
after 300 B.C.; negative numbers first arose around A.D. 600, but became
acceptable only in the 1600s (Descartes, in 1637, called them false); and
complex numbers gradually won acceptance between the early 1500s and 1800.
A precise understanding of the real numbers was reached only in the 1870s. As
the domain of numbers broadened, so did mathematics, and its applications. For
example, with only the natural numbers available, calculus would be unthinkable.
Since 1800 mathematics has developed many new systems of objects that can
be manipulatedin the same wayastheseclassical sets of numbers.Just aswith
classical numbers, once the domain of numbers is expanded, so do the uses that
can be made of them. This book is about these new sets of numbers and some of
their uses. In this chapter well set up some notation for classical sets of
numbers, and introduce the idea of an equivalence relation, which will be the
basis for constructing new sets of numbers in later chapters. First, notation. L.N.
Childs, A Concrete Introduction to Higher Algebra, Undergraduate Texts 3
inMathematics,cSpringer Science+Business Media LLC 2009