Number Worlds: Visual and Experimental Access to Elementary Number Theory Concepts

Number Worlds: Visual and Experimental Access to Elementary Number Theory Concepts

Recent research demonstrates that many issues related to the structure of natural numbers and the relationship among numbers are not well grasped by students. In this article, we describe a computer-based learning environment called Number Worlds that was designed to support the exploration of elementary number theory concepts by making the essential relationships and patterns more accessible t...

Elementary Number Theory

Elementary number theory

The division relation plays a prominent role throughout this note, and so, we start by presenting some of its basic properties and their relation to addition and multiplication. First, it is re exive because multiplication has a unit (i.e., m= 1×m) and it is transitive, since multiplication is associative. It is also (almost) preserved by linear combination because multiplication distributes ov...

Elementary Number Theory

Forward We start with the set of natural numbers, N = {1, 2, 3, . . .} equipped with the familiar addition and multiplication and assume that it satisfies the induction axiom. It allows us to establish division with a residue and the Euclid’s algorithm that computes the greatest commond divisor of two natural numbers. It also leads to a proof of the fundamental theorem of arithmetic: Every natu...

Number Theory and Elementary Arithmetic

Elementary arithmetic (also known as “elementary function arithmetic”) is a fragment of first-order arithmetic so weak that it cannot prove the totality of an iterated exponential function. Surprisingly, however, the theory turns out to be remarkably robust. I will discuss formal results that show that many theorems of number theory and combinatorics are derivable in elementary arithmetic, and ...