PROD

This book is about numbers. But not the usual boring numbers you’ve had drilled into your head since you could barely talk or the numbers that made you decide math was dull and confusing. Instead, we’re going to learn about productive numbers.

What makes them new? No counting. Just primes.

What do they look like? Trees! Here’s a few:

What are they good for? Ummm we’ll get back to that…

So why should I bother reading this? Because they’re awesome and beautiful and sufficiently simple that even an amateur mathematician could discover them. So it should be fun. For the pros, you can learn about a new distributive lattice.

So let’s crack on!

Warning

This book does rely on some concepts that would have been too fun to teach at high school. I’ve written a preliminaries to catch you up on the basics.

Alternatively, skip straight to the main action if you want. If you’re really short for time, there’s a summary too.