I would recommend studying the history of mathematical development to see just what sort of limitations the ancient Greeks and other civilizations faced in their research.

Great answer to a question. Next time someone asks me something, I'll tell them to study up on it.

It's likely that your only exposure to mathematics so far has been through rote memorization or solving computational problems.

Yea, so weird. It's not like 99.9% of the populace learns math that way. And why are you shitting on me. The question is solid. And my premises are solid. You can count stuff. You can't count non-stuff.

I already layed out the whole argument about negative numbers. They deal in theoreticval things that are not real. They revolve around a point of reference, and in opposition to a positive direction (the material world). Negative something isn't the same as substracting something. Negative could mean that the number is meant to be substracted, but in mainstream theory, the negative number is "opposite" of a positive number. Actually the negativity itself is portrayed as "opposite". That's why we can calculate minus minus 2, although it's fucking stupid, and no real problem would have you construct the solution like that. I said real life problem. Debt isn't real life. I already said that debt only becomes real when you pay it back. All the time up until that, your actual money is higher, and the "debt" is only theorizing about what your balance would be after you pay it back. Obviously, I know that it's useful, and I use it myself, but we need to be clear on what it means. Negative numbers can't exist in the real world with real life problems. They can only exist in temporal problems and with a point of reference, which will always be arbitrary. The coordinate system only works because negative numbers are a linear continuation of the infinite line. Beyond zero, there could have been bananas.

And no one is arguing whether the tools are useful. The point was that ancient greeks didn't have negatives, so how did they do all the geometry? They probably calculated differences between the bigger thing and the smaller thing, and interpreted the positive result in a positive or negative way. Like they should. Negative numbers aren't part of the real world. That's probably why normal numbers are called (let me google it) REAL numbers.