The surprising gems in elementary level math

We all know associativity in the context of basic math a + (b + c) = (a + b) + c. It intuitively means that we can order a, b and c in any order without changing the outcome. We can replace + with * and it would still be correct. Associativity describes a property of the relationship between “entities”, we generalize this further to speak about compute. One example off this is Merge-sort which can be easily multi threaded on the combine step. The combine step in merge sort is associative and designing “entities” in a way that their interactions are associative leads to I would argue more maintainable concurrent code. It leads to the relationships being more extendable.