How were negative numbers eliminated?
Does anyone know if there is there a name for the idea that new concepts (such as negative numbers, complex numbers or type constructors in a type system) are only ever introduced into a preexisting "system" so that they can be eliminated later, after helping make some progress?
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The idea is that at some point in the distant past, there was a system of counting that didn't involve negative numbers. But it didn't give us a way to deal with concepts like "owing", so negative numbers were introduced. We still don't really have an *understading* of a...
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Meta-level concept? Syntactic sugar? Auxiliary concept?
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I think it's more fundamental than that...
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Likely there is a word in German for that! LoL
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Type erasure? :D
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I'm looking for something *way* more general... ;)
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Isn't that basically how science works? Introduce a hypothesis to use until a better one appears?
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This sounds like a left adjoint.
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Isn't it the right adjoint? In my mind the right adjoint is the detour we take to solve the problem on the left. If you have better mnemonics I'm all ears!
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