Natural Number
In mathematics, the natural numbers are the ordinary whole numbers used for counting ("there are 6 coins on the table") and ordering ("this is the 3rd largest city in the country"). These purposes are related to the linguistic notions of cardinal and ordinal numbers, respectively (see English numerals). A later notion is that of a nominal number, which is used only for naming.
Properties of the natural numbers related to divisibility, such as the distribution of prime numbers, are studied in number theory. Problems concerning counting and ordering, such as partition enumeration, are studied in combinatorics.
There is no universal agreement about whether to include zero in the set of natural numbers: some define the natural numbers to be the positive integers {1, 2, 3, ...}, while for others the term designates the non-negative integers {0, 1, 2, 3, ...}. The former definition is the traditional one, with the latter definition having first appeared in the 19th century. Some authors use the term "natural number" to exclude zero and "whole number" to include it; others use "whole number" in a way that excludes zero, or in a way that includes both zero and the negative integers.
Read more about Natural Number: History of Natural Numbers and The Status of Zero, Notation, Algebraic Properties, Properties, Generalizations, Formal Definitions
Famous quotes containing the words natural and/or number:
“Nothing natural can be wholly unworthy.”
—Anna Julia Cooper (1859–1964)
“Strange goings on! Jones did it slowly, deliberately, in the bathroom, with a knife, at midnight. What he did was butter a piece of toast. We are too familiar with the language of action to notice at first an anomaly: the ‘it’ of ‘Jones did it slowly, deliberately,...’ seems to refer to some entity, presumably an action, that is then characterized in a number of ways.”
—Donald Davidson (b. 1917)