With the advent of the 1 and the accumulation of many of those 1's, we start to create larger and larger numbers of 1's - which get pretty clumsy to work with.
Questions
What are Counting Numbers? What are Natural Numbers? Where did they come from?Answer
The Counting Numbers are the numbers we grew up counting: 1, 2, 3,... Natural Numbers are that same group of numbers and sometimes includes the number 0 as well. They developed from people's needs to be able to express larger numbers of things.Analysis
Once the number 1 was established as a number, and people started looking at a certain number of "1s"or tick marks, the need to have more numbers results (although some cultures found it sufficient to use "1, 2, many").
At some point, the ability to express a certain number of "1s" would become important - and so words would be created to express larger and larger groups of "1s".
That then is how we get to the Counting Numbers - these are the numbers that arise from having 1, then having 1 more than that, then having one more than that, etc. The Counting Numbers are the numbers we grew up counting: 1, 2, 3, 4, ... all the way to however high up you want to go (true story - when I was quite young, I could count to 120 but not beyond. The older neighbourhood kids thought that was quite funny...).
The term Natural Numbers can also be used to express this same set of numbers (although sometimes people include the number 0 in with the Natural Numbers - yes folks, mathematicians will debate and deliberate on if 0 should be considered a Natural Number or not...). Because of this, when someone uses the term "Natural Number", make sure to know if they are including 0 or not.
The set of Counting/Natural Numbers is symbolized by
.While I used this image in The Number 1, I'll use it again here to show the first few numbers (0 through 9) and again this image is from quora.com:
For more information check out the following (comment to add a resource to the list!):
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition's post on the history of numbers
Images of numerals in different countries
Where might you have come from?
Fact-orials Index
Numbers:
Where might we go?
Numbers:
Operations:
Graphing
No comments:
Post a Comment
Hi there - I'm glad to see you are thinking about or maybe even getting ready to post a comment! I moderate all comments so please be patient while I hit the "ok" button on yours. Feel free to make suggestions on web resources to add, directions the entries should go,... whatever. And thanks again for leaving some feedback!