THE NATURAL

NUMBERS &
INTEGERS

www.edx.org/xseries/adelaidex-math-trackx
 The Natural Numbers

In this section you will review natural numbers and some associated concepts such as factors, prime and composite
numbers.

The natural numbers, sometimes called counting numbers, are the numbers

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, . . . , 100, . . . . . . . . . , 12594, . . . , etc

The natural numbers tend to come up in problems where you’re counting something (hence their other name –
“counting numbers”). For instance, when you’re describing a real-world problem as a mathematical problem you’ll
have a variable whose possible values are natural numbers.

As a specific example, you might be interested in the number n of cars that a car manufacturing plant produces.
The number n is a “variable” in this problem because the number of cars produced by the plant changes from time to
time. This variable n is a natural number (you can’t produce negative cars or fractions of cars). It’s kind of tiresome
though to keep having to write “n is a natural number” over and over again.

It’s handy to have some mathematical notation, which helps you express precisely what it is you mean, and which
saves you some time! For this reason it’s handy to be able to talk about the set of natural numbers.

This is the set consisting of all the natural numbers. There’s a special symbol that’s used to label this set; a
“blackboard-bold” capital N. In other words

N = { 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, . . . }

It’s also handy to have some special notation to help you indicate that a number belongs to the set N – in other words
that a number is a natural number. The symbol ∈ means “belongs to” or “is an element of”. Thus the string of
symbols
22 ∈ N
means the number 22 belongs to the set of natural numbers. In other words, 22 is a natural number.
In the car manufacturing example above we can indicate that the variable n is a natural number simply by writing

n ∈ N.

Compare this with writing

n is a natural number.
Which do you prefer?

Sometimes you’ll want to indicate that a number does not belong to a certain set. For example, the number 3.14159
is not a natural number. How can you indicate this using symbols? What you can do here is put a stroke through the
symbol ∈ and write ∈./ The symbol ∈ / means “does not belong” or “is not an element of”. So you can indicate that
3.14159 is not a natural number symbolically by writing

/ N.
3.14159 ∈

Addition and multiplication

You can add natural numbers and multiply them together. For example

123 + 706 = 829

21 × 23 = 483

Notice that multiplying by 1 doesn’t change the number you start with! For example

1×1=1
1 × 12 = 12
1 × 10023 = 10023
etc.

MathTrackX - The Natural Numbers 1

Patterns for addition and multiplication

There are some patterns that occur when you add and multiply natural numbers. None of these patterns will come
as a huge shock to you, but perhaps you have not stopped to think about them before.
Here is one of the patterns: the order in which you add or multiply does not matter. For example

112 + 256 = 368 = 256 + 112

and
24 × 30 = 720 = 30 × 24.
You can express these patterns in symbols:

For all natural numbers m and n:

m+n=n+m
and
m×n=n×m

There is a name for this pattern: you say “addition and multiplication is commutative”. So commutativity is
what lets you swap numbers around when you add or multiply them.

Here is another pattern: if you add or multiply three or more natural numbers together, it does not matter what
order you do the operations in.

For example, suppose you want to add the three numbers 12, 23 and 47 together. There are two possible orders
you can add them. Either this way:
12 + (23 + 47)
(adding 23 and 47 first), or this way:
(12 + 23) + 47.
Notice that you get exactly the same answer either way. Try it and see! So

12 + (23 + 47) = 82 = (12 + 23) + 47.

It’s the same when you multiply, for instance

7 × (5 × 11) = 385 = (7 × 5) × 11

You can express these two patterns we have just observed in symbols like this:

for all natural numbers m, n and p,

m + (n + p) = (m + n) + p
and
m × (n × p) = (m × n) × p.

This pattern also has a name: you say “addition and multiplication are associative”. So associativity is what lets
you perform operations in either order.

There’s one other pattern that is super useful. Suppose you want to multiply 42 × 7. If you doing this in your
head, you might first multiply
40 × 7 = 280
because it’s easy to multiply by 10, and then add

2 × 7 = 14.

So you’d combine this in one step as

42 × 7 = (40 + 2) × 7 = 40 × 7 + 2 × 7 = 280 + 14 = 294.

When you do this you are using a pattern which explains how addition and multiplication interact. Here is the pattern
expressed in symbols:

MathTrackX - The Natural Numbers 2

 For all natural numbers m, n and p,

(m + n) × p = m × p + n × p

and
m × (n + p) = m × n + m × p.

This last pattern is what lets you expand brackets. It is called the distributive law.

Shortcuts with notation for multiplication and powers

When you solve problems, you’ll often have some variables which are natural numbers (or other types of numbers
that we will soon discuss). For example, you might have variables m and n. In this type of situation, it’s normal to
remove the multiplication sign × in the product m × n and just write mn or else indicate the multiplication with a
dot, like this: m · n. Just so you know!

Here is some other notation that is very useful. Sometimes you want to take a number and multiply it by itself a
bunch of times. This is the “power” notation. For example if you want to multiply 2 by itself 4 times, then instead
of writing 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 you write
24
(pronounced “2 to the power 4”). So 24 = 16. In general, if n is a natural number, then 2n means 2 multiplied by
itself n times, so
2n = 2 × 2 × · · · × 2
  
n times

Here are some examples:

21 = 2
22 = 4
23 = 8
24 = 16
25 = 32
26 = 64
...

This works for any natural number m instead of 2. You define mn (pronounced “m to the power n”) as

mn = m × m × · · · × m
  
n times

For example,
55 = 5 × 5 × 5 × 5 × 5 = 3125.
If n = 1, then mn = m1 = m.

Factoring natural numbers

Sometimes you’ll want to talk about the factors of a natural number. For example, since

2 × 3 = 6,

we say 2 and 3 are factors of 6. You will need to know the precise mathematical meaning of factor though, i.e. the
definition of factor. Here it is:

a natural number m is a factor of a natural number n if there is another natural number k such that n = mk.

MathTrackX - The Natural Numbers 3

 In other words n is a multiple of m. Can you see why 2 is a factor of 6 according to this definition? The number
6 is the number n in the definition; the number 2 is the number m in the definition, and the number 3 is the number
k in the definition.

Here are some more examples: 27 is a factor of 81 since 81 = 27 × 3, but 3 is not a factor of 5.

A natural number is even if it is a multiple of 2. The even natural numbers are

2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, . . .
The odd natural numbers are those which are not multiples of 2; so the odd natural numbers are
1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15, 17, . . .

Prime and composite numbers

Notice that 1 is a factor of every natural number n, since n = n × 1. Similarly n is always a factor of itself, since
n = n × 1. There are some natural numbers n for which the only factors of n are 1 and n.

For example, 5 = 1 × 5, but there is no other way to get an answer of 5 by multiplying two natural numbers
together. So the only factors of 5 are 1 and 5. Compare this with the factors of 6: since 6 = 2 × 3 = 1 × 6 we see that
the factors of 6 are 1,2,3 and 6.
Maybe all this talk of factors is starting to ring some bells from way back in primary school – maybe you’re starting
to remember about “prime” numbers and “composite” numbers.

Remember that

a natural number n is prime if it’s only factors are 1 and n. A natural number is composite if it is not prime.

For example 5 is prime but 6 is composite. The prime numbers are kind of special. Here’s a list of them:
2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, 31, 37, 41, 43, 47, . . .
This list goes on forever, but it starts to get hard to work out if a given number is prime or not. In fact it gets
really, really hard to factor huge numbers, even with a computer. This problem gets so hard that it’s used in
cryptography. When you buy something on the internet, your credit card details are often secured using something
called the “RSA algorithm”. To keep your credit card details safe, this algorithm relies on the fact that it’s hard to
factor huge numbers.

There’s one last thing you should know about factoring numbers. Suppose you take a natural number n. Then
either n is prime, or else it is composite. If n is composite, then it factors into smaller numbers: n = mk. These
numbers m and k could themselves be prime, or else they could be composite, in which case they would factor into
smaller numbers. These smaller numbers could themselves be prime, or else they could be composite, And so on! If
you think about it, you see that every number is either prime, or else it is a product of primes.

Let’s look at an example. Take the number 2520. What are it’s factors? Obviously it is even, so it has a factor of
2:
2520 = 2 × 1260.
The number 1260 is obviously even: 1260 = 2 × 630 = 2 × 2 × 315. The number 315 obviously has a factor of 5:
315 = 5 × 63 and 63 = 9 × 7 = 3 × 3 × 7. Let’s put this all together:
2520 = 2 × 1260
= 2 × 2 × 2 × 315
= 2 × 2 × 2 × 5 × 63
= 2 × 2 × 2 × 5 × 3 × 3 × 7.
In other words, writing the factors from smallest to largest:
2520 = 2 × 2 × 2 × 3 × 3 × 5 × 7
Can you see how all of these factors are prime? Can you also see that there is no other way to factor 2520 into a
product of primes? This is true for any natural number: it is either a prime or else it is a product of primes, in exactly
one way. This property of natural numbers is called unique factorization into primes.

MathTrackX - The Natural Numbers 4

 The Integers
The natural numbers are cool, but they don’t have negatives which sort of limits their usefulness. In this section
you will see how to enlarge the set of natural numbers to include negatives. This enlarged set is the set of integers.

The set of integers

Recall that the set of natural numbers is the set

N = {1, 2, 3, 4, . . .}.

The set of integers contains all of the natural numbers 1, 2, 3, . . . together with their negatives −1, −2, −3, . . . and the
number 0. So the set of integers is the set

{. . . , −4, −3, −2, −1, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, . . .}.

Now there is a very non-obvious name for this set. Remember that the set of natural numbers is called N (for Natural);
so you’d think that there might be a similar naming convention for the integers. But no. The set of integers is called
Z. No, don’t argue! It’s called Z. So

Z = {. . . , −4, −3, −1, −1, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, . . .}.

The reason it’s called Z (in case you’re interested) is because the German word for “number” is Zahlen.

Here are some examples to help you get used to the notation (remember the special symbols ∈ and ∈
/ mean “is an
element of” and “is not an element of”).

−2048 ∈ Z, 101 ∈ Z, 0 ∈ Z,
/ Z, −1.7 ∈
13.5 ∈ / Z, π ∈
/ Z.

Do you understand what this sequence of symbols is telling you?

Addition of integers

Just like for natural numbers you can add and multiply integers. Actually, when you add a negative integer to
another integer you usually say that you’re “subtracting”. For instance,

113 + (−241)

is normally expressed as
113 − 241
(“113 subtract 241”). The answer is 113 − 241 = −128 (... I hope you didn’t use your calculator to work that out!).

Negatives

If n is an integer then the negative of n is the integer −n. It’s the unique integer that you add to n to get zero:
n + (−n) = 0. So the negative of 1 is −1, the negative of 2 is −2, the negative of 3 is −3, ... and so on. The set of
integers
{−1, −2, −3, −4, . . .}
is called the set of negative integers.

What about the negative of a negative integers? Remember that “two minus signs cancel to give a positive sign”;
therefore
−(−1) = 1,
in other words the negative of −1 is 1, which makes sense since −1 + 1 = 0. So

− (−1) = 1
− (−2) = 2
− (−3) = 3
− (−4) = 4
...

MathTrackX - The Natural Numbers 5

Notice that the negative of zero is zero:
−0 = 0.
Multiplication

You can multiply integers together just as you can multiply natural numbers together. You need to be a bit careful
when you multiply by negative integers. Let’s start by thinking about multiplication by −1.

Here’s the thing: if you multiply an integer by −1, that integer changes to it’s negative. In symbols this means

(−1) × n = −n.

For example
(−1) × 2 = −2 and (−1) × (−3) = 3.
Can you see why that last example works? (Remember that −(−3) = 3.)

Once you understand multiplication by −1 you’ll understand how to multiply by a negative integer. For instance,
to multiply
(−21) × 35
you realize that this is the same as
(−1) × 21 × 35
because −21 = (−1) × 21. So you can work this out by first multiplying 21 × 35 = 735 and then changing the sign. So

(−21) × 35 = (−1) × 21 × 35 = (−1) × 735 = −735.

Here’s another example:

(−32) × (−48) = (−1) × (−1) × 32 × 48 = (−1) × (−1) × 1536 = (−1) × (−1536) = 1536.

Addition and multiplication by zero

Pay special attention to adding and multiplying by zero (0). Adding zero to a number does not change it;
multiplying by zero has a drastic effect – if you multiply a number by zero, you get zero. For example:

11389663 + 0 = 11389663
777535 × 0 = 0

MathTrackX - The Natural Numbers 6