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Number - Encyclopedia, History, Geography and Biography |
 | | The arithmetical operations of numbers, such as addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, are generalized in the branch of mathematics called abstract algebra, the study of abstract number systems such as groups, rings and fields. |
 | | Sets of numbers that are not subsets of the complex numbers include the quaternions , invented by Sir William Rowan Hamilton, in which multiplication is not commutative, and the octonions, in which multiplication is not associative. |
 | | The existence of complex numbers was not completely accepted until the geometrical interpretation had been described by Caspar Wessel in 1799; it was rediscovered several years later and popularized by Carl Friedrich Gauss, and as a result the theory of complex numbers received a notable expansion. |
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