Commutative property

Common uses

The commutative property (or commutative law) is a property generally associated with binary operations and functions. If the commutative property holds for a pair of elements under a certain binary operation then the two elements are said to commute under that operation.

Mathematical definitions

The term "commutative" is used in several related senses.

Commutative operations in everyday life

Putting on socks resembles a commutative operation since which sock is put on first is unimportant. Either way, the result (having both socks on), is the same. In contrast, putting on underwear and trousers is not commutative.

The commutativity of addition is observed when paying for an item with cash. Regardless of the order the bills are handed over in, they always give the same total.

Commutative operations in mathematics

Two well-known examples of commutative binary operations:

The addition of real numbers is commutative, since

For example 4 + 5 = 5 + 4, since both expressions equal 9.

The multiplication of real numbers is commutative, since

For example, 3 × 5 = 5 × 3, since both expressions equal 15.

Some binary truth functions are also commutative, since the truth tables for the functions are the same when one changes the order of the operands.

For example, the logical biconditional function p ↔ q is equivalent to q ↔ p. This function is also written as p IFF q, or as p ≡ q, or as Epq. The last form is an example of the most concise notation in the article on truth functions, which lists the sixteen possible binary truth functions of which eight are commutative: Vpq = Vqp; Apq (OR) = Aqp; Dpq (NAND) = Dqp; Epq (IFF) = Eqp; Jpq = Jqp; Kpq (AND) = Kqp; Xpq (NOR) = Xqp; Opq = Oqp.

Further examples of commutative binary operations include addition and multiplication of complex numbers, addition and scalar multiplication of vectors, and intersection and union of sets.

Noncommutative operations in everyday life

Concatenation, the act of joining character strings together, is a noncommutative operation. For example,

E A + T = E A T ≠ T E A = T + E A

Washing and drying clothes resembles a noncommutative operation; washing and then drying produces a markedly different result to drying and then washing.

Rotating a book 90° around a vertical axis then 90° around a horizontal axis produces a different orientation than when the rotations are performed in the opposite order.

The twists of the Rubik's Cube are noncommutative. This can be studied using group theory.

Also thought processes are noncommutative: A person asked a question (A) and then a question (B) may give different answers to each question than a person asked first (B) and then (A), because asking a question may change the person's state of mind.

Noncommutative operations in mathematics

Some non-commutative binary operations:

History and etymology

Records of the implicit use of the commutative property go back to ancient times. The Egyptians used the commutative property of multiplication to simplify computing products. Euclid is known to have assumed the commutative property of multiplication in his book Elements. Formal uses of the commutative property arose in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, when mathematicians began to work on a theory of functions. Today the commutative property is a well known and basic property used in most branches of mathematics.

The first recorded use of the term commutative was in a memoir by François Servois in 1814, which used the word commutatives when describing functions that have what is now called the commutative property. The word is a combination of the French word commuter meaning "to substitute or switch" and the suffix -ative meaning "tending to" so the word literally means "tending to substitute or switch." The term then appeared in English in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1844.

Rule of replacement

In truth-functional propositional logic, commutation, or commutativity refer to two valid rules of replacement. The rules allow one to transpose propositional variables within logical expressions in logical proofs. The rules are:

( P ∨ Q ) ⇔ ( Q ∨ P )

and

( P ∧ Q ) ⇔ ( Q ∧ P )

where " ⇔ " is a metalogical symbol representing "can be replaced in a proof with."

Truth functional connectives

Commutativity is a property of some logical connectives of truth functional propositional logic. The following logical equivalences demonstrate that commutativity is a property of particular connectives. The following are truth-functional tautologies.

Commutativity of conjunction

( P ∧ Q ) ↔ ( Q ∧ P )

Commutativity of disjunction

( P ∨ Q ) ↔ ( Q ∨ P )

Commutativity of implication (also called the law of permutation)

( P → ( Q → R ) ) ↔ ( Q → ( P → R ) )

Commutativity of equivalence (also called the complete commutative law of equivalence)

( P ↔ Q ) ↔ ( Q ↔ P )

Set theory

In group and set theory, many algebraic structures are called commutative when certain operands satisfy the commutative property. In higher branches of mathematics, such as analysis and linear algebra the commutativity of well-known operations (such as addition and multiplication on real and complex numbers) is often used (or implicitly assumed) in proofs.

Mathematical structures and commutativity

A commutative semigroup is a set endowed with a total, associative and commutative operation.

If the operation additionally has an identity element, we have a commutative monoid

An abelian group, or commutative group is a group whose group operation is commutative.

A commutative ring is a ring whose multiplication is commutative. (Addition in a ring is always commutative.)

In a field both addition and multiplication are commutative.

Associativity

The associative property is closely related to the commutative property. The associative property of an expression containing two or more occurrences of the same operator states that the order operations are performed in does not affect the final result, as long as the order of terms doesn't change. In contrast, the commutative property states that the order of the terms does not affect the final result.

Most commutative operations encountered in practice are also associative. However, commutativity does not imply associativity. A counterexample is the function

f ( x , y ) = x + y 2 ,

which is clearly commutative (interchanging x and y does not affect the result), but it is not associative (since, for example, f ( − 4 , f ( 0 , + 4 ) ) = − 1 but f ( f ( − 4 , 0 ) , + 4 ) = + 1 ). More such examples may be found in Commutative non-associative magmas.

Symmetry

Some forms of symmetry can be directly linked to commutativity. When a commutative operator is written as a binary function then the resulting function is symmetric across the line y = x. As an example, if we let a function f represent addition (a commutative operation) so that f(x,y) = x + y then f is a symmetric function, which can be seen in the image on the right.

For relations, a symmetric relation is analogous to a commutative operation, in that if a relation R is symmetric, then a R b ⇔ b R a .

Non-commuting operators in quantum mechanics

In quantum mechanics as formulated by Schrödinger, physical variables are represented by linear operators such as x (meaning multiply by x), and d d x . These two operators do not commute as may be seen by considering the effect of their compositions x d d x and d d x x (also called products of operators) on a one-dimensional wave function ψ ( x ) :

According to the uncertainty principle of Heisenberg, if the two operators representing a pair of variables do not commute, then that pair of variables are mutually complementary, which means they cannot be simultaneously measured or known precisely. For example, the position and the linear momentum in the x-direction of a particle are represented by the operators x and − i ℏ ∂ ∂ x , respectively (where ℏ is the reduced Planck constant). This is the same example except for the constant − i ℏ , so again the operators do not commute and the physical meaning is that the position and linear momentum in a given direction are complementary.