Well, I was thinking more along the lines of, say, multiplication and division - you can handle every single equation humanity has ever come up with without eit

Well, I was thinking more along the lines of, say, multiplication and division - you can handle every single equation humanity has ever come up with without either of them. It might be messy and awful and annoying, but I would say in particular these operations are invented more than discovered. So, more properly phrased, we created some operations.