Addition Algorithms

3 + 2 = 5 with apples, a popular choice in textbooks

Addition (usually signified by the plus symbol +) is one of the four basic operations of arithmetic, the other three being subtraction, multiplication and division. The addition of two whole numbers results in the total amount or sum of those values combined. The example in the adjacent image shows a combination of three apples and two apples, making a total of five apples. This observation is equivalent to the mathematical expression "3 + 2 = 5" (that is, "3 plus 2 is equal to 5").

Besides counting items, addition can also be defined and executed without referring to concrete objects, using abstractions called numbers instead, such as integers, real numbers and complex numbers. Addition belongs to arithmetic, a branch of mathematics. In algebra, another area of mathematics, addition can also be performed on abstract objects such as vectors, matrices, subspaces and subgroups.

Addition has several important properties. It is commutative, meaning that order does not matter, and it is associative, meaning that when one adds more than two numbers, the order in which addition is performed does not matter (see Summation). Repeated addition of 1 is the same as counting. Addition of 0 does not change a number. Addition also obeys predictable rules concerning related operations such as subtraction and multiplication.

Performing addition is one of the simplest numerical tasks. Addition of very small numbers is accessible to toddlers; the most basic task, 1 + 1, can be performed by infants as young as five months, and even some members of other animal species. In primary education, students are taught to add numbers in the decimal system, starting with single digits and progressively tackling more difficult problems. Mechanical aids range from the ancient abacus to the modern computer, where research on the most efficient implementations of addition continues to this day.

Notation and terminology

The plus sign

Addition is written using the plus sign "+" between the terms; that is, in infix notation. The result is expressed with an equals sign. For example,

$1+1=2$ ("one plus one equals two")

$2+2=4$ ("two plus two equals four")

$1+2=3$ ("one plus two equals three")

$5+4+2=11$ (see "associativity" below)

$3+3+3+3=12$ (see "multiplication" below)

Columnar addition – the numbers in the column are to be added, with the sum written below the underlined number.

There are also situations where addition is "understood", even though no symbol appears:

• A whole number followed immediately by a fraction indicates the sum of the two, called a mixed number. For example,
  $$3{\frac {1}{2}}=3+{\frac {1}{2}}=3.5.$$
  This notation can cause confusion, since in most other contexts, juxtaposition denotes multiplication instead.

The sum of a series of related numbers can be expressed through capital sigma notation, which compactly denotes iteration. For example,

$\sum _{k=1}^{5}k^{2}=1^{2}+2^{2}+3^{2}+4^{2}+5^{2}=55.$

The numbers or the objects to be added in general addition are collectively referred to as the terms, the addends or the summands; this terminology carries over to the summation of multiple terms. This is to be distinguished from factors, which are multiplied. Some authors call the first addend the augend. In fact, during the Renaissance, many authors did not consider the first addend an "addend" at all. Today, due to the commutative property of addition, "augend" is rarely used, and both terms are generally called addends.

All of the above terminology derives from Latin. "Addition" and "add" are English words derived from the Latin verb addere, which is in turn a compound of ad "to" and dare "to give", from the Proto-Indo-European root *deh₃- "to give"; thus to add is to give to. Using the gerundive suffix -nd results in "addend", "thing to be added". Likewise from augere "to increase", one gets "augend", "thing to be increased".

Redrawn illustration from The Art of Nombryng, one of the first English arithmetic texts, in the 15th century.

"Sum" and "summand" derive from the Latin noun summa "the highest, the top" and associated verb summare. This is appropriate not only because the sum of two positive numbers is greater than either, but because it was common for the ancient Greeks and Romans to add upward, contrary to the modern practice of adding downward, so that a sum was literally higher than the addends. Addere and summare date back at least to Boethius, if not to earlier Roman writers such as Vitruvius and Frontinus; Boethius also used several other terms for the addition operation. The later Middle English terms "adden" and "adding" were popularized by Chaucer.

The plus sign "+" (Unicode:U+002B; ASCII: +) is an abbreviation of the Latin word et, meaning "and". It appears in mathematical works dating back to at least 1489.

Interpretations

Addition is used to model many physical processes. Even for the simple case of adding natural numbers, there are many possible interpretations and even more visual representations.

Combining sets

Possibly the most fundamental interpretation of addition lies in combining sets:

• When two or more disjoint collections are combined into a single collection, the number of objects in the single collection is the sum of the numbers of objects in the original collections.

This interpretation is easy to visualize, with little danger of ambiguity. It is also useful in higher mathematics (for the rigorous definition it inspires). However, it is not obvious how one should extend this version of addition to include fractional numbers or negative numbers.

One possible fix is to consider collections of objects that can be easily divided, such as pies or, still better, segmented rods. Rather than solely combining collections of segments, rods can be joined end-to-end, which illustrates another conception of addition: adding not the rods but the lengths of the rods.

Extending a length

A number-line visualization of the algebraic addition 2 + 4 = 6. A translation by 2 followed by a translation by 4 is the same as a translation by 6.

A number-line visualization of the unary addition 2 + 4 = 6. A translation by 4 is equivalent to four translations by 1.

A second interpretation of addition comes from extending an initial length by a given length:

• When an original length is extended by a given amount, the final length is the sum of the original length and the length of the extension.

The sum a + b can be interpreted as a binary operation that combines a and b, in an algebraic sense, or it can be interpreted as the addition of b more units to a. Under the latter interpretation, the parts of a sum a + b play asymmetric roles, and the operation a + b is viewed as applying the unary operation +b to a. Instead of calling both a and b addends, it is more appropriate to call a the augend in this case, since a plays a passive role. The unary view is also useful when discussing subtraction, because each unary addition operation has an inverse unary subtraction operation, and vice versa.

Properties

Commutativity

4 + 2 = 2 + 4 with blocks

Addition is commutative, meaning that one can change the order of the terms in a sum, but still get the same result. Symbolically, if a and b are any two numbers, then

a + b = b + a.

The fact that addition is commutative is known as the "commutative law of addition" or "commutative property of addition". Some other binary operations are commutative, such as multiplication, but many others are not, such as subtraction and division.

Associativity

2 + (1 + 3) = (2 + 1) + 3 with segmented rods

Addition is associative, which means that when three or more numbers are added together, the order of operations does not change the result.

As an example, should the expression a + b + c be defined to mean (a + b) + c or a + (b + c)? Given that addition is associative, the choice of definition is irrelevant. For any three numbers a, b, and c, it is true that (a + b) + c = a + (b + c). For example, (1 + 2) + 3 = 3 + 3 = 6 = 1 + 5 = 1 + (2 + 3).

When addition is used together with other operations, the order of operations becomes important. In the standard order of operations, addition is a lower priority than exponentiation, nth roots, multiplication and division, but is given equal priority to subtraction.

Identity element

5 + 0 = 5 with bags of dots

Adding zero to any number, does not change the number; this means that zero is the identity element for addition, and is also known as the additive identity. In symbols, for every a, one has

a + 0 = 0 + a = a.

This law was first identified in Brahmagupta's Brahmasphutasiddhanta in 628 AD, although he wrote it as three separate laws, depending on whether a is negative, positive, or zero itself, and he used words rather than algebraic symbols. Later Indian mathematicians refined the concept; around the year 830, Mahavira wrote, "zero becomes the same as what is added to it", corresponding to the unary statement 0 + a = a. In the 12th century, Bhaskara wrote, "In the addition of cipher, or subtraction of it, the quantity, positive or negative, remains the same", corresponding to the unary statement a + 0 = a.

Successor

Within the context of integers, addition of one also plays a special role: for any integer a, the integer (a + 1) is the least integer greater than a, also known as the successor of a. For instance, 3 is the successor of 2 and 7 is the successor of 6. Because of this succession, the value of a + b can also be seen as the bth successor of a, making addition iterated succession. For example, 6 + 2 is 8, because 8 is the successor of 7, which is the successor of 6, making 8 the 2nd successor of 6.

Units

To numerically add physical quantities with units, they must be expressed with common units. For example, adding 50 milliliters to 150 milliliters gives 200 milliliters. However, if a measure of 5 feet is extended by 2 inches, the sum is 62 inches, since 60 inches is synonymous with 5 feet. On the other hand, it is usually meaningless to try to add 3 meters and 4 square meters, since those units are incomparable; this sort of consideration is fundamental in dimensional analysis.

Performing addition

Innate ability

Studies on mathematical development starting around the 1980s have exploited the phenomenon of habituation: infants look longer at situations that are unexpected. A seminal experiment by Karen Wynn in 1992 involving Mickey Mouse dolls manipulated behind a screen demonstrated that five-month-old infants expect 1 + 1 to be 2, and they are comparatively surprised when a physical situation seems to imply that 1 + 1 is either 1 or 3. This finding has since been affirmed by a variety of laboratories using different methodologies. Another 1992 experiment with older toddlers, between 18 and 35 months, exploited their development of motor control by allowing them to retrieve ping-pong balls from a box; the youngest responded well for small numbers, while older subjects were able to compute sums up to 5.

Even some nonhuman animals show a limited ability to add, particularly primates. In a 1995 experiment imitating Wynn's 1992 result (but using eggplants instead of dolls), rhesus macaque and cottontop tamarin monkeys performed similarly to human infants. More dramatically, after being taught the meanings of the Arabic numerals 0 through 4, one chimpanzee was able to compute the sum of two numerals without further training. More recently, Asian elephants have demonstrated an ability to perform basic arithmetic.

Childhood learning

Typically, children first master counting. When given a problem that requires that two items and three items be combined, young children model the situation with physical objects, often fingers or a drawing, and then count the total. As they gain experience, they learn or discover the strategy of "counting-on": asked to find two plus three, children count three past two, saying "three, four, five" (usually ticking off fingers), and arriving at five. This strategy seems almost universal; children can easily pick it up from peers or teachers. Most discover it independently. With additional experience, children learn to add more quickly by exploiting the commutativity of addition by counting up from the larger number, in this case, starting with three and counting "four, five." Eventually children begin to recall certain addition facts ("number bonds"), either through experience or rote memorization. Once some facts are committed to memory, children begin to derive unknown facts from known ones. For example, a child asked to add six and seven may know that 6 + 6 = 12 and then reason that 6 + 7 is one more, or 13. Such derived facts can be found very quickly and most elementary school students eventually rely on a mixture of memorized and derived facts to add fluently.

Different nations introduce whole numbers and arithmetic at different ages, with many countries teaching addition in pre-school. However, throughout the world, addition is taught by the end of the first year of elementary school.

Table

Children are often presented with the addition table of pairs of numbers from 0 to 9 to memorize. Knowing this, children can perform any addition.

+	0	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9
0	0	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9
1	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
2	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11
3	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12
4	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	13
5	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	13	14
6	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	13	14	15
7	7	8	9	10	11	12	13	14	15	16
8	8	9	10	11	12	13	14	15	16	17
9	9	10	11	12	13	14	15	16	17	18

Decimal system

The prerequisite to addition in the decimal system is the fluent recall or derivation of the 100 single-digit "addition facts". One could memorize all the facts by rote, but pattern-based strategies are more enlightening and, for most people, more efficient:

• Commutative property: Mentioned above, using the pattern a + b = b + a reduces the number of "addition facts" from 100 to 55.
• One or two more: Adding 1 or 2 is a basic task, and it can be accomplished through counting on or, ultimately, intuition.
• Zero: Since zero is the additive identity, adding zero is trivial. Nonetheless, in the teaching of arithmetic, some students are introduced to addition as a process that always increases the addends; word problems may help rationalize the "exception" of zero.
• Doubles: Adding a number to itself is related to counting by two and to multiplication. Doubles facts form a backbone for many related facts, and students find them relatively easy to grasp.
• Near-doubles: Sums such as 6 + 7 = 13 can be quickly derived from the doubles fact 6 + 6 = 12 by adding one more, or from 7 + 7 = 14 but subtracting one.
• Five and ten: Sums of the form 5 + x and 10 + x are usually memorized early and can be used for deriving other facts. For example, 6 + 7 = 13 can be derived from 5 + 7 = 12 by adding one more.
• Making ten: An advanced strategy uses 10 as an intermediate for sums involving 8 or 9; for example, 8 + 6 = 8 + 2 + 4 = 10 + 4 = 14.

As students grow older, they commit more facts to memory, and learn to derive other facts rapidly and fluently. Many students never commit all the facts to memory, but can still find any basic fact quickly.

Carry

The standard algorithm for adding multidigit numbers is to align the addends vertically and add the columns, starting from the ones column on the right. If a column exceeds nine, the extra digit is "carried" into the next column. For example, in the addition 27 + 59

  ¹
  27
+ 59
————
  86

7 + 9 = 16, and the digit 1 is the carry. An alternate strategy starts adding from the most significant digit on the left; this route makes carrying a little clumsier, but it is faster at getting a rough estimate of the sum. There are many alternative methods.

Decimal fractions

Decimal fractions can be added by a simple modification of the above process. One aligns two decimal fractions above each other, with the decimal point in the same location. If necessary, one can add trailing zeros to a shorter decimal to make it the same length as the longer decimal. Finally, one performs the same addition process as above, except the decimal point is placed in the answer, exactly where it was placed in the summands.

As an example, 45.1 + 4.34 can be solved as follows:

   4 5 . 1 0
+  0 4 . 3 4
————————————
   4 9 . 4 4

Scientific notation

In scientific notation, numbers are written in the form $x=a\times 10^{b}$, where $a$ is the significand and $10^{b}$ is the exponential part. Addition requires two numbers in scientific notation to be represented using the same exponential part, so that the two significands can simply be added.

For example:

$2.34\times 10^{-5}+5.67\times 10^{-6}=2.34\times 10^{-5}+0.567\times 10^{-5}=2.907\times 10^{-5}$

Non-decimal

Addition in other bases is very similar to decimal addition. As an example, one can consider addition in binary. Adding two single-digit binary numbers is relatively simple, using a form of carrying:

0 + 0 → 0

0 + 1 → 1

1 + 0 → 1

1 + 1 → 0, carry 1 (since 1 + 1 = 2 = 0 + (1 × 2¹))

Adding two "1" digits produces a digit "0", while 1 must be added to the next column. This is similar to what happens in decimal when certain single-digit numbers are added together; if the result equals or exceeds the value of the radix (10), the digit to the left is incremented:

5 + 5 → 0, carry 1 (since 5 + 5 = 10 = 0 + (1 × 10¹))

7 + 9 → 6, carry 1 (since 7 + 9 = 16 = 6 + (1 × 10¹))

This is known as carrying. When the result of an addition exceeds the value of a digit, the procedure is to "carry" the excess amount divided by the radix (that is, 10/10) to the left, adding it to the next positional value. This is correct since the next position has a weight that is higher by a factor equal to the radix. Carrying works the same way in binary:

  1 1 1 1 1    (carried digits)
    0 1 1 0 1
+   1 0 1 1 1
—————————————
  1 0 0 1 0 0 = 36

In this example, two numerals are being added together: 01101₂ (13₁₀) and 10111₂ (23₁₀). The top row shows the carry bits used. Starting in the rightmost column, 1 + 1 = 10₂. The 1 is carried to the left, and the 0 is written at the bottom of the rightmost column. The second column from the right is added: 1 + 0 + 1 = 10₂ again; the 1 is carried, and 0 is written at the bottom. The third column: 1 + 1 + 1 = 11₂. This time, a 1 is carried, and a 1 is written in the bottom row. Proceeding like this gives the final answer 100100₂ (36₁₀).

Related operations

Addition, along with subtraction, multiplication and division, is considered one of the basic operations and is used in elementary arithmetic.

Arithmetic

Subtraction can be thought of as a kind of addition—that is, the addition of an additive inverse. Subtraction is itself a sort of inverse to addition, in that adding x and subtracting x are inverse functions.

Given a set with an addition operation, one cannot always define a corresponding subtraction operation on that set; the set of natural numbers is a simple example. On the other hand, a subtraction operation uniquely determines an addition operation, an additive inverse operation, and an additive identity; for this reason, an additive group can be described as a set that is closed under subtraction.

Multiplication can be thought of as repeated addition. If a single term x appears in a sum n times, then the sum is the product of n and x. If n is not a natural number, the product may still make sense; for example, multiplication by −1 yields the additive inverse of a number.

A circular slide rule

In the real and complex numbers, addition and multiplication can be interchanged by the exponential function:

$e^{a+b}=e^{a}e^{b}.$

This identity allows multiplication to be carried out by consulting a table of logarithms and computing addition by hand; it also enables multiplication on a slide rule. The formula is still a good first-order approximation in the broad context of Lie groups, where it relates multiplication of infinitesimal group elements with addition of vectors in the associated Lie algebra.

There are even more generalizations of multiplication than addition. In general, multiplication operations always distribute over addition; this requirement is formalized in the definition of a ring. In some contexts, such as the integers, distributivity over addition and the existence of a multiplicative identity is enough to uniquely determine the multiplication operation. The distributive property also provides information about addition; by expanding the product (1 + 1)(a + b) in both ways, one concludes that addition is forced to be commutative. For this reason, ring addition is commutative in general.

Division is an arithmetic operation remotely related to addition. Since a/b = a(b⁻¹), division is right distributive over addition: (a + b) / c = a/c + b/c. However, division is not left distributive over addition; 1 / (2 + 2) is not the same as 1/2 + 1/2.

Ordering

The maximum operation "max (a, b)" is a binary operation similar to addition. In fact, if two nonnegative numbers a and b are of different orders of magnitude, then their sum is approximately equal to their maximum. This approximation is extremely useful in the applications of mathematics, for example in truncating Taylor series. However, it presents a perpetual difficulty in numerical analysis, essentially since "max" is not invertible. If b is much greater than a, then a straightforward calculation of (a + b) − b can accumulate an unacceptable round-off error, perhaps even returning zero. See also Loss of significance.

The approximation becomes exact in a kind of infinite limit; if either a or b is an infinite cardinal number, their cardinal sum is exactly equal to the greater of the two. Accordingly, there is no subtraction operation for infinite cardinals.

Maximization is commutative and associative, like addition. Furthermore, since addition preserves the ordering of real numbers, addition distributes over "max" in the same way that multiplication distributes over addition:

$a+\max(b,c)=\max(a+b,a+c).$

For these reasons, in tropical geometry one replaces multiplication with addition and addition with maximization. In this context, addition is called "tropical multiplication", maximization is called "tropical addition", and the tropical "additive identity" is negative infinity. Some authors prefer to replace addition with minimization; then the additive identity is positive infinity.

Tying these observations together, tropical addition is approximately related to regular addition through the logarithm:

$\log(a+b)\approx \max(\log a,\log b),$

which becomes more accurate as the base of the logarithm increases. The approximation can be made exact by extracting a constant h, named by analogy with Planck's constant from quantum mechanics, and taking the "classical limit" as h tends to zero:

$\max(a,b)=\lim _{h\to 0}h\log(e^{a/h}+e^{b/h}).$

In this sense, the maximum operation is a dequantized version of addition.

Other ways to add

Incrementation, also known as the successor operation, is the addition of 1 to a number.

Summation describes the addition of arbitrarily many numbers, usually more than just two. It includes the idea of the sum of a single number, which is itself, and the empty sum, which is zero. An infinite summation is a delicate procedure known as a series.

Counting a finite set is equivalent to summing 1 over the set.

Integration is a kind of "summation" over a continuum, or more precisely and generally, over a differentiable manifold. Integration over a zero-dimensional manifold reduces to summation.

Linear combinations combine multiplication and summation; they are sums in which each term has a multiplier, usually a real or complex number. Linear combinations are especially useful in contexts where straightforward addition would violate some normalization rule, such as mixing of strategies in game theory or superposition of states in quantum mechanics.

Convolution is used to add two independent random variables defined by distribution functions. Its usual definition combines integration, subtraction, and multiplication. In general, convolution is useful as a kind of domain-side addition; by contrast, vector addition is a kind of range-side addition.

Licensing

Content obtained and/or adapted from:

• Addition, Wikipedia under a CC BY-SA license