What a Mathematics Course Can Teach You About Transcendental Arguments

Some time ago, I was taking a Mathematics course and we were dealing with Set Theory - particularly the set of Real Numbers.

I won't bore you with the details, but we were talking about the axioms of addition, multiplication, binary operations, etc. And basically, all it was was the abstract foundation of the ordinary basic arithmetic that we do.

In the middle of the lecture, what crossed my mind was how abstract all of it was. When people do ordinary addition or multiplication, they do not have a...