It’s not arbitrary. Really try to think about the problem at hand. The ‘why’ is quite apparent. Ask yourself why did they go with 99+1+98+2… in the first place? And why is that the same as 101+101…? What was the benefit of simplifying it to that? How did it save the student time?
You can deduce this yourself and literally no memorization is involved to figure this out. No formulas needed either.
nova_ad_vitum@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
The rules underpinning math are axioms in the end, but they’re not completely arbitrary, because if you change them in most cases it just fucks everything up.
The axioms that were chosen were chosen for good reason, and the rules they result in (such as summation and multiplication being commutative so 3x4=4x3 and 3+4=4+3) allow more complex rules to be created.
There’s a lot of philosophy of math at the core of all this , but it’s not really true that this is all arbitrary.
cucumber_sandwich@lemmy.world 1 year ago
But commutation is not an axiom, is it?