How do you explain pi * e? It's clear the multiplication as repeated addition holds for the natural numbers, which form a closed ring anyway. Pi and E are suff

How do you explain pi * e? It's clear the multiplication as repeated addition holds for the natural numbers, which form a closed ring anyway. Pi and E are sufficiently advanced that by the time you get there you must understand that the operation being described by multiplication is not the same operation at all (depending on how one constructs the real numbers, multiplication of reals is multiplication of sets or functions)