Two's Complement and Group Theory

Before I discovered math, I was a first year undergrad computer science student taking Electrical Engineering 101. The first topic I learned was what bits and boolean gates are, and the second was the two’s complement representation of a negative n-bit integer. At the time two’s complement seemed to me like a bizarre quirk of computer programming, with minutiae you just had to memorize. If the leading bit is 1, it’s negative, and otherwise it’s positive.