Algebra is an extremely useful tool in mathematics. It because it is a simple idea - perhaps not what most people think so. It is by nature a highly abstract process so here's a more concrete version - fruit algebra. What does this represent?
Then it would be sensible to think that if you have a banana to start off on the table and then put an apple to its right then you would have a banana and an apple which is exactly the same as having an apple and a banana.
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This is a fundamental concept in algebra that has the rather impressive name of `the commutative law of addition'. It's a hi-falutin' way of saying that it doesn't matter whether you put the second piece of fruit to the left or to the right of the first piece. This is because we are just interested in how many pieces and types of fruit you have, not how they are arranged. So you see it's easy to understand technical mathematics.
So far there is an apple and a banana on the table. You now put an orange to the left of the banana. You would have gotten exactly the same result if you first had a banana and orange and then added the apple to right of them.
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Here the round brackets represent that you place the fruit (that are inside the brackets) on the table first before adding the fruit that is outside the brackets later. This also has an impressive name: `the associative law of addition'. Once again you can see that this piece of technical mathematics is easy to understand.
It doesn't stop with fruit - you can use algebra to move physical and/ or non-physical objects in an abstract way for example you could put an elephant with two rainbows:
To actually find an elephant and to place it togther with two rainbows is not exactly easy to do in the physical world so you can use algebra to put them together in an algebraic abstraction of the world.
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