Tag: negative numbers

According to Mehrtens, the concept of negative numbers became self-evident to people only with the establishment of a bourgeois society, where the calculation of debt became an economic necessity. In Gaub’s attempt to position the significance of the negative numbers in their usefulness for mathematical pursuits rather that in their origin, Mehrthens sees the birth of modern mathematics: “That they can seem ‘concrete, ‘ even ‘natural’ is grounded in the practice of mathematics and its self-evidence. This is one side of modern autonomy: an ontology internal to the discipline.