Your Tuesday puzzle TheJournal.ie [Video]

IN HONOUR OF Maths Week, as is our annual tradition, we’re setting our readers some puzzles. Give them a go!

The Basic Operators

With the development of counting came the need to add, subtract, divide and multiply numbers. These are the basic operations of arithmetic, and the word arithmetic comes from the Greek word arithmos, meaning “number”.

Ancient civilisations such as the Sumerians, Babylonians, and Egyptians used early forms of arithmetic to keep records of trade, land, taxes, and food production.

Our own ancient ancestors would have used their own form of arithmetic to build amazing structures such as Newgrange.

We still use arithmetic for our daily problem-solving activities, but it also underpins higher branches of math like algebra and geometry. While we mostly use the four basic operations there are also more complex operations such as powers and roots. In arithmetic we use standard symbols for the operators, for instance: + – …