ABSTRACT
Preview Activity 10.1. In Investigation 5, we saw how equivalence relations can be used to iden-
tify mathematical objects that are the same (or equivalent) in one way or another. The notion of
“sameness” is very important in mathematics, for it allows us to identify when two objects should
be considered indistinguishable, and thus treated identically. Identifying sameness also makes our
analysis more efficient, since it allows us to consider entire classes of objects at the same time,
instead of dealing with each object individually.
