Do addition and multiplication have arity? Many books classify the standard four arithmetical functions of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division as binary (in terms of arity).  But, "sigma" and "product" notation often writes just one symbol at the front, and indexes those symbols which seemingly makes expressions like $+(2, 3, 4)=9$ meaningful.  Of course, we can't do something similar for division and subtraction, since they don't associate, but does the $+$ symbol in the above expression qualify as the same type of expression as when someone writes $2+4=6$?  Do addition and multiplication qualify as functions which don't necessarily have a fixed arity, or do they actually have a fixed arity, and thus instances of sigma and product notation should get taken as abbreviation of expressions involving binary functions?  Or is the above question merely a matter of perspective?  Do we get into any logical difficulties if we regard addition and multiplication as $n$-ary functions, or can we only avoid such difficulties if we regard addition and multiplication as binary?

There are no logical difficulties passing back and forth between binary associative operations and their higher-arity extensions. However, a theorem of  Sierpinski (Fund. Math., 33 (1945) 169-73) shows that higher-order operations are not needed: every finitary operation may be expressed as a composition of binary operations. The proof is especially simple for operations on a finite set $\rm\:A\:.\:$  Namely, if $\rm\:|A| = n\:$ then we may encode $\rm\:A\:$ by $\rm\:\mathbb Z/n\:,\:$ the ring of integers $\rm\:mod\ n\:,\:$ allowing us to employ Lagrange interpolation to represent any finitary operation as a finite composition of the binary operations $\rm\: +,\ *\:,\:$ and $\rm\: \delta(a,b) = 1\ if\ a=b\ else\ 0\:,\:$ namely
$$\rm f(x_1,\ldots,x_n)\ = \sum_{(a_1,\ldots,a_n)\ \in\ A^n}\ f(a_1,\ldots,a_n)\ \prod_{i\ =\ 1}^n\ \delta(x_i,a_i) $$
When $\rm\:|A|\:$ is infinite one may instead proceed by employing pairing functions $\rm\:A^2\to A\:.$
