Multiplication is a bit more general thing than that. Take multiplication of fractions, for example. You can't express that as the number of discrete blocks in

Multiplication is a bit more general thing than that. Take multiplication of fractions, for example. You can't express that as the number of discrete blocks in a M by N rectangle. Of course you could generalize M*N to mean "the surface area of the quadrilateral defined by two perpendicular sides with the lengths M and N", which is pretty close to the original. Multiplication with negative or complex numbers will be more difficult to fit into this analogy. edit: some spelling