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The multiplication of whole numbers may be thought of as repeated addition; that is, the multiplication of two numbers is equivalent to adding as many copies of one of them, the multiplicand, as the quantity of the other one, the multiplier; both numbers can be referred to as factors.
Multiplication is often defined for natural numbers, then extended to whole numbers, fractions, and irrational numbers. However, abstract algebra has a more general definition of multiplication as a binary operation on some objects that may or may not be numbers. Notably, one can multiply complex numbers, vectors, matrices, and quaternions.
In mathematics, a product is the result of multiplication, or an expression that identifies objects (numbers or variables) to be multiplied, called factors.For example, 21 is the product of 3 and 7 (the result of multiplication), and (+) is the product of and (+) (indicating that the two factors should be multiplied together).
The term arithmetic has its root in the Latin term arithmetica which derives from the Ancient Greek words ἀριθμός (arithmos), meaning ' number ', and ἀριθμητική τέχνη (arithmetike tekhne), meaning ' the art of counting '. [3] There are disagreements about its precise definition.
The numbers or the objects to be added in general addition are collectively referred to as the terms, [6] the addends [7] [8] [9] or the summands; [10] this terminology carries over to the summation of multiple terms. This is to be distinguished from factors, which are multiplied.
For example, in the real numbers, the squaring operation only produces non-negative numbers; the codomain is the set of real numbers, but the range is the non-negative numbers. Operations can involve dissimilar objects: a vector can be multiplied by a scalar to form another vector (an operation known as scalar multiplication ), [ 13 ] and the ...
The multiplication sign (×), also known as the times sign or the dimension sign, is a mathematical symbol used to denote the operation of multiplication, which results in a product.
When placed after special sets of numbers, plus and minus signs are used to indicate that only positive numbers and negative numbers are included, respectively. For example, Z + {\displaystyle \mathbb {Z} ^{+}} is the set of all positive integers and Z − {\displaystyle \mathbb {Z} ^{-}} is the set of all negative integers.