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Chapter 1 The Integers

As children we start exploring the properties and structure of the positive integers as soon as we learn to count and we extend our understanding throughout our schooling as we learn about new operations and collections of numbers. We begin our journey into abstract algebra with an overview of some familiar (and some possibly unfamiliar) properties of the integers that are relevant to our course of inquiry. With this foundation set, we will see in later chapters just how far we can extend these properties in more abstract setting.