Part 8, Chapter 1, Algebra 1

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The book "E-Z Algebra 1", introduces a mysterious Stranger into the story with a description of his entrance to read as the king steps up to the 'Stranger.' "The rest of us cowered in fear (not noticing the 'non sequitur), but the king stood 'defiantly' and looked the stranger directly in the eyes. "Never!" he said. "We accept your challenge, and we shall learn this subject that you call algebra. And," he added, "by the way, who are you?" The stranger passed out copies of his business card. "You may call me the gremlin," he said. "But shall we begin. Before you develop rules of behavior for numbers, you will need to define precisely what a number is."(Grandma defines it as a way to name the amount of something we can count starting with 0 for nothing to the thing we call 1 on a continuous line we call the number line. For example, we have 1-one pair of pants or a skirt and 2-two shoes else we would have nothing on our bodies. Therefore. numbers follow a line into eternity ... or a sideways 8, oo.) "Everybody knows what a number is," Recordis said. "We learned that in kindergarten," Recordis made a list of numbers, 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,... "We called these numbers the "natural numbers' or the "counting numbers.' We even showed how they could be represented on a diagram we called a "number line,' where the numbers became bigger as you move to the right.""... (The book showed a number line with numbers on it. Grandma decided not to show this. Grandma says to use numbers we show how much there is of certain items else there would be nothing of anything.) "However, it turned out to be no easy matter to define the word "number." Recordis suggested that a number was the result you get when you counted something, but then we were unable to define the word "count," We tried other definitions without success. All this time the gremlin stood laughing at us. He finally posed another question for us. "You have symbolized the operation of addition by a plus sign(+), but what exactly does the operation of addition mean?" "That's even easier!" Recordis said, "Addition is the operation of adding two numbers together to form a sum." "(Grandma says, "It is just the process of taking a certain amount of something to the amount we already have of it.") "However, we quickly realized that this definition was no good because it used the word "adding" in the definition of the word "addition." (To be continued in another part.)