While it might seem a bit basic and maybe a bit boring, I think that the number groups we’ve been learning for years now are incredibly important. For the last few years, at the start of every math class, I’ve learned about them, and then like clockwork, promptly forget everything I know about them. Usually, they don’t really ever come into play for the rest of the semester, which means we don’t really have a chance to practice. This past week however, I found that while reviewing/recapping the topic, all the things we learned previously came back to me much easier than before. To explain the concept of the groups, I find it easiest to imagine them as a sort of Russian nesting doll. Within the category of “real” numbers there are two smaller categories, those two being “rational” and “irrational” numbers. Irrational numbers stand on their own and have no smaller group within them, while rational numbers include another group, integers. Within the category of integers, you can find the group of whole numbers, which in turn has an even smaller group, natural numbers.