During the years from kindergarten to eighth grade, students must repeatedly extend their conception of number. At first, “number” means “counting number”: 1, 2, 3... Soon after that, 0 is used to represent “none” and the whole numbers are formed by the counting numbers together with zero. The next extension is fractions. At first, fractions are barely numbers and tied strongly to pictorial representations. Yet by the time students understand division of fractions, they have a strong concept of fractions as numbers and have connected them, via their decimal representations, with the base-ten system used to represent the whole numbers. During middle school, fractions are augmented by negative fractions to form the rational numbers. In Grade 8, students extend this system once more, augmenting the rational numbers with the irrational numbers to form the real numbers. In high school, students will be exposed to yet another extension of number, when the real numbers are augmented by the imaginary numbers to form the complex numbers.

With each extension of number, the meanings of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division are extended. In each new number system—integers, rational numbers, real numbers, and complex numbers—the four operations stay the same in two important ways: They have the commutative, associative, and distributive properties and their new meanings are consistent with their previous meanings.

Extending the properties of whole-number exponents leads to new and productive notation. For example, properties of whole-number exponents suggest that (5^1/3)³ should be 5^(1/3)3 = 5¹ = 5 and that 5^1/3 should be the cube root of 5.

Calculators, spreadsheets, and computer algebra systems can provide ways for students to become better acquainted with these new number systems and their notation. They can be used to generate data for numerical experiments, to help understand the workings of matrix, vector, and complex number algebra, and to experiment with non-integer exponents.

In real world problems, the answers are usually not numbers but quantities: numbers with units, which involves measurement. In their work in measurement up through Grade 8, students primarily measure commonly used attributes such as length, area, and volume. In high school, students encounter a wider variety of units in modeling, e.g., acceleration, currency conversions, derived quantities such as person-hours and heating degree days, social science rates such as per-capita income, and rates in everyday life such as points scored per game or batting averages. They also encounter novel situations in which they themselves must conceive the attributes of interest. For example, to find a good measure of overall highway safety, they might propose measures such as fatalities per year, fatalities per year per driver, or fatalities per vehicle-mile traveled. Such a conceptual process is sometimes called quantification. Quantification is important for science, as when surface area suddenly “stands out” as an important variable in evaporation. Quantification is also important for companies, which must conceptualize relevant attributes and create or choose suitable measures for them.

1: Explain how the definition of the meaning of rational exponents follows from extending the properties of integer exponents to those values, allowing for a notation for radicals in terms of rational exponents. For example, we define 5^1/3 to be the cube root of 5 because we want (5^1/3)³ = 5^(1/3)3 to hold, so (5^1/3)³ must equal 5.

2: Rewrite expressions involving radicals and rational exponents using the properties of exponents.

3: Explain why the sum or product of two rational numbers is rational; that the sum of a rational number and an irrational number is irrational; and that the product of a nonzero rational number and an irrational number is irrational.

1: Use units as a way to understand problems and to guide the solution of multi-step problems; choose and interpret units consistently in formulas; choose and interpret the scale and the origin in graphs and data displays.

2: Define appropriate quantities for the purpose of descriptive modeling.

3: Choose a level of accuracy appropriate to limitations on measurement when reporting quantities.

1: Know there is a complex number i such that i2 = –1, and every complex number has the form a + bi with a and b real.

2: Use the relation i2 = –1 and the commutative, associative, and distributive properties to add, subtract, and multiply complex numbers.

3: (+) Find the conjugate of a complex number; use conjugates to find moduli and quotients of complex numbers.

4: (+) Represent complex numbers on the complex plane in rectangular and polar form (including real and imaginary numbers), and explain why the rectangular and polar forms of a given complex number represent the same number.

5: (+) Represent addition, subtraction, multiplication, and conjugation of complex numbers geometrically on the complex plane; use properties of this representation for computation. For example, (1 – √3i)³ = 8 because (1 – √3i) has modulus 2 and argument 120°.

6: (+) Calculate the distance between numbers in the complex plane as the modulus of the difference, and the midpoint of a segment as the average of the numbers at its endpoints.

7: Solve quadratic equations with real coefficients that have complex solutions.

8: (+) Extend polynomial identities to the complex numbers. For example, rewrite x² + 4 as (x + 2i)(x – 2i).

9: (+) Know the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra; show that it is true for quadratic polynomials.

1: (+) Recognize vector quantities as having both magnitude and direction. Represent vector quantities by directed line segments, and use appropriate symbols for vectors and their magnitudes (e.g., v, |v|, ||v||, v).

2: (+) Find the components of a vector by subtracting the coordinates of an initial point from the coordinates of a terminal point.

3: (+) Solve problems involving velocity and other quantities that can be represented by vectors.

4: (+) Add and subtract vectors

5: (+) Multiply a vector by a scalar.

6: (+) Use matrices to represent and manipulate data, e.g., to represent payoffs or incidence relationships in a network.

7: (+) Multiply matrices by scalars to produce new matrices, e.g., as when all of the payoffs in a game are doubled.

8: (+) Add, subtract, and multiply matrices of appropriate dimensions.

9: (+) Understand that, unlike multiplication of numbers, matrix multiplication for square matrices is not a commutative operation, but still satisfies the associative and distributive properties.

10: (+) Understand that the zero and identity matrices play a role in matrix addition and multiplication similar to the role of 0 and 1 in the real numbers. The determinant of a square matrix is nonzero if and only if the matrix has a multiplicative inverse.

11: (+) Multiply a vector (regarded as a matrix with one column) by a matrix of suitable dimensions to produce another vector. Work with matrices as transformations of vectors.

12: (+) Work with 2 × 2 matrices as transformations of the plane, and interpret the absolute value of the determinant in terms of area.