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Liu Hui (c. 3rd century) established rules for adding and subtracting negative numbers. [4] By the 7th century, Indian mathematicians such as Brahmagupta were describing the use of negative numbers. Islamic mathematicians further developed the rules of subtracting and multiplying negative numbers and solved problems with negative coefficients. [5]
Some elementary teachers use raised minus signs before numbers to disambiguate them from the operation of subtraction. [21] The same convention is also used in some computer languages. For example, subtracting −5 from 3 might be read as "positive three take away negative 5", and be shown as 3 − − 5 becomes 3 + 5 = 8, which can be read as:
While primarily associated with natural numbers in arithmetic, subtraction can also represent removing or decreasing physical and abstract quantities using different kinds of objects including negative numbers, fractions, irrational numbers, vectors, decimals, functions, and matrices. [2] In a sense, subtraction is the inverse of addition.
The smaller numbers, for use when subtracting, are the nines' complement of the larger numbers, which are used when adding. In mathematics and computing , the method of complements is a technique to encode a symmetric range of positive and negative integers in a way that they can use the same algorithm (or mechanism ) for addition throughout ...
Two's complement is the most common method of representing signed (positive, negative, and zero) integers on computers, [1] and more generally, fixed point binary values. Two's complement uses the binary digit with the greatest value as the sign to indicate whether the binary number is positive or negative; when the most significant bit is 1 the number is signed as negative and when the most ...
Subtraction is often treated as a special case of addition: instead of subtracting a positive number, it is also possible to add a negative number. For instance = + (). This helps to simplify mathematical computations by reducing the number of basic arithmetic operations needed to perform calculations. [48]
The sum of two numbers is unique; there is only one correct answer for a sums. [8] When the sum of a pair of digits results in a two-digit number, the "tens" digit is referred to as the "carry digit". [9] In elementary arithmetic, students typically learn to add whole numbers and may also learn about topics such as negative numbers and fractions.
This follows the ones' complement rules that a value is negative when the left-most bit is 1, and that a negative number is the bit complement of the number's magnitude. The value also behaves as zero when computing. Adding or subtracting negative zero to/from another value produces the original value. Adding negative zero: