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Chapter 1 Foundations

This chapter has two purposes. It reviews basic mathematics you learned earlier and introduces the language of mathematics. We discuss statements about integers and definitions of integer properties. We introduce variables as placeholders for integers and explain how they are used in mathematics. We end with an introduction to exponentiation and its properties.
Although we work with integers in this section, the same mathematical language is used for other mathematical objects. In later chapters, we will study sets, functions, and groups.