The generation of negative numbers is closely related to people's production and life. For example, when calculating the rice stored in the granary, sometimes we should remember the amount of grain collected and sometimes we should remember the amount of grain borrowed; In bookkeeping, sometimes you make a profit and sometimes you lose money. In order to record this opposite number, people introduced the concepts of positive and negative numbers, recorded the income of grain or surplus currency as positive numbers, and recorded the loans of grain or deficit currency as negative numbers.

People in ancient China have long realized the existence value of negative numbers. The concept of positive and negative numbers has been put forward in Nine Chapters Arithmetic of Han Dynasty. Liu Hui, a mathematician in the Three Kingdoms period, also gave a method to distinguish between positive and negative numbers when taking notes for this book: when calculating chips, black chips are often used to represent negative numbers, and red chips are used to represent positive numbers; Or use oblique columns to represent negative numbers and positive columns to represent positive numbers; Alternatively, a rectangle represents a negative number and a triangle represents a positive number. Among them, the practice of distinguishing positive and negative numbers with different colors has been preserved until now. Nowadays, red is generally used to represent negative numbers-when a newspaper announces that a country's economy is in deficit, it means that expenditure is greater than income and the country is losing money.

In addition to "Nine Chapters Arithmetic", there are many mathematical works in ancient China that mentioned the arithmetic laws of negative numbers and negative numbers, such as adding negative numbers to negative numbers, multiplying negative numbers to positive numbers and so on. Yang Hui, a mathematician in the Southern Song Dynasty, emphasized the close relationship between positive and negative numbers and addition and subtraction in the detailed explanation of Nine Chapters Arithmetic. Zhu Shijie, a mathematician in the Yuan Dynasty, not only summed up the law of addition and subtraction of positive and negative numbers, but also put forward the law of multiplication of positive and negative numbers in "Arithmetic Enlightenment". At this time, people have officially regarded positive and negative numbers as a special direction of mathematical research, and made unremitting efforts along this direction.

Summary: Indians realized the existence of negative numbers more than 700 years later than China, while Europeans were more than 1000 years later than China. It was not until after the Renaissance that mathematicians began to study negative numbers. Now, negative numbers have been widely used in the world, and many remaining problems have been solved.