What term describes the property of terms that can be multiplied or divided in any order?
ie, xyz = yxz
or x+y+xy+c = c+x+y+yx
What term describes the property of terms that can be multiplied or divided in any order?
ie, xyz = yxz
or x+y+xy+c = c+x+y+yx
The property that describes the fact that the order in which a sum or product is done does not affect the outcome of the sum or product is called the commutative property, and the property may extend to all sorts of different operations, like group multiplication (in Abelian groups, of course).
EDIT: Notice that commutativity does not always hold; as an example, consider multiplication of matrices in the set of all $n\times n$ matrices with entries in (for definiteness) the reals, in which the only matrices that commute with all other scalar matrices are the matrices that are scalar multiples of the identity, i.e., matrices of the type $cI$ , where $c$ is a real scalar, and $I$ is the identity See e.g this link. Still, there are subsets of the set of all matrices with real entries that commute with each other under multiplication, like rotation matrices (with all rotations done about the same axis of rotation). The fact that these matrices commute is a reflection of the fact that rotating (again, fixing the axis of rotation) first by an angle $\theta$ and then by $\alpha$ is equivalent to rotating first by $\alpha$ and then by $\theta$.