From Keith Devlin's article
http://www.maa.org/devlin/devlin_06_08.html
"Multiplication is repeated addition."
This is true when multiplying natural numbers, but is a special case of a scaling operation in the reals. We know it is also a rotation in the complexes, but that should probably be left out at the beginning, although it might interesting to think about how one would include them at the beginning.
Devlin also mentions "exponentiation is repeated multiplication."