In the course of man’s evolution, questions have been raised about how to assess the population of a herd, the production of a crop, the size of a property, the days that separate him from an event, the sharing of an inheritance … He put in place the tools of enumeration and the rules of calculation. Numbers and operations form the basis of mathematical language.

Four elementary operations translate the notions "I have more", "I have less", "I repeat", "I share". A mathematical operation associates numbers (operands) with a mathematical sign (the operator): +, -, ×, ÷. A mathematical operation involves collections of objects (or quantities) of the same nature.