Commutative property

An operation (especially a binary operation) is said to be commutative if the order of its arguments does not affect the value.

For example, the operation addition is commutative on the most commonly used number systems (the complex numbers and its subsets such as the real numbers, integers, etc.) because . However, the operation of division is not commutative over these sets because usually .

An operation which is not commutative is said to be noncommutative.

Commutivity is especially important in abstract algebra. The study of groups in which the group operation is commutative (abelian groups) is a very important part of group theory.