Abstract
The natural number sequence is the list of counting numbers used in everyday life. They are such an important component of our general knowledge that they are one of the first things we teach our children. When our babies are two or three years old, we begin by holding their hands up and pointing to each successive finger as we say the appropriate word for that number of fingers. We are encouraged when our children say the correct number back to us: “one, two, three, four, ...” But is this counting? Not quite.
I had been to school most of the time, and could spell, and read, and write just a little, and could say the multiplication table up to six times seven is thirty-five, and I don’t reckon I could ever get any further than that if I was to live forever. I don’t take no stock in mathematics, anyway.—Huck Finn
Mark Twain
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn1
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End Notes
Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Franklin Center, PA: The Franklin Library, 1983), p. 19.
Donald R. Griffin, Animal Thinking (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984); Guy Woodruff and David Pemack, “Primate Mathematical Concepts in the Chimpanzee: Proportionality and Numerosity,” Nature, Vol. 293, October 15, 1981, 568.
Recent evidence suggests that Homo erectus may be much older—as much as 2.5 million years old.
Denise Schmandt-Besserat, Before Writing (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1992).
Jacques Soustelle, Mexico (New York: World Publishing Company, 1967), p. 125.
Peano’s axioms actually contain the primitive term “zero” rather than “1.” For this illustration I have begun the number sequence with 1 rather than zero.
Kathleen Freeman, Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966), p. 75.
Sir Thomas Heath, A History of Greek Mathematics (London: Oxford University Press, 1921), p. 75.
Aristotle, The Basic Works of Aristotle, trans. J. Annas (Richard McKoen, ed.) (New York: Random House, 1941); The Metaphysics, 986a, lines 15–18, Oxford University Press.
James R. Newman, “The Rhind Papyrus,” in The World of Mathematics, Vol. 1, ed. James R. Newman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956), p. 174.
Heath, A History of Greek Mathematics, p. 76.
Internet: sci.math, Alex Lopez-Ortiz, University of Waterloo, alopez-o@maytag.UWaterloo.ca, 6/16/94.
Ibid.
Philip J. Davis, The Lore of Large Numbers (New York: Random House, 1961), p. 23.
Internet: sci.math, Lee Rudolph, Department of Mathematics, Clark University, rudolph@cis.umassd.edu, 6/27/94.
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© 1996 Calvin C. Clawson
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Clawson, C.C. (1996). Discovery of the Number Sequence. In: Mathematical Mysteries. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-6080-1_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-6080-1_2
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