Imagine you have a bunch of toys to share with your friends. You decide to put them into different groups so that each friend gets an equal amount of toys. This process of splitting things into equal groups is called division.
In math, division is a very important operation that helps us figure out how many times one number goes into another number evenly. For example, if you have 10 toys and you want to share them equally among 2 friends, you can do the division operation 10 ÷ 2 = 5. This means each friend gets 5 toys.
Now, a division algebra is a special kind of algebra where we can divide numbers. Just like how we divided toys in our example, in a division algebra, we can divide one number by another number and get a unique answer for every pair of numbers we use.
But not all algebras are division algebras. Some algebras don't allow for division because some pairs of numbers don't have a unique answer when divided. For example, in the algebra of integers (whole numbers), if we try to divide 10 by 3, we get a quotient of 3 with a remainder of 1. This means 10 ÷ 3 = 3 R 1, and we can't get a unique answer for every pair of numbers we use in this algebra.
So, a division algebra is a special algebra that allows us to divide any number by any other number and get a unique answer each time. They are important in mathematics and physics, especially in the study of higher dimensional spaces and structures.