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Are negative numbers nonsensical?
 Portrait of Francis Maseres, attorney, bureaucrat and writer, circa 1775, hanging in the Centre d'archives de Montréal' |
According to the English mathematician, Francis Maseres, writing in 1759, negative numbers were absurd, something that “darkened the very whole doctrines of the equations”. |
Negative numbers, and controversies surrounding them, have had a pivotal influence on the development of mathematics.
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