Right, in fact the interaction between multiplication and addition is one of the most fundamental forms of chaos due to combining recursive operations. One could say, addition is repeated counting. Multiplication is repeated addition. And the interaction between the two points a finger at the relationship between space and time.

And yes I agree. It is glorious that the binary operations that seemed so natural to us formed the basis for groups, rings, and fields. Associativity, commutativity, distributivity of two related operations are quite the pearls :-) Its also interesting as a programmer and from a "properties of functions" perspective to study magmas and semigroups and groupoids..etc..

Knowing more about abstract algebra in terms of special properties of functions has led me to believe that most programmers are missing out on some of the beauty of functions by merely implementing them and not so much understanding the common properties and classifications of them.