What Is A Number ?

By Author: Johnson Philip
Total Articles: 90
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My present-day readers live in a world so dominated by numbers and number-crunching that the question might look childish or even stupid to most. But wait! Tell me what a "number" is before you decide to do something else?

You might say that a number is a number that represents how many things there are. In that response lies the key to my question! You said a number is something that REPRESENTS something else. In other words, a number in itself is only a code, a symbol, or an abstract entity that represents how many real things are there! Thus a number is a kind of a code!

A code is some kind of an abstract entity that represents something else. Abstract in the sense that you cannot point a number the way you can show a chair or table. It represents something else because in itself a number is either just a theoretical thing, or during practical application it represents something totally different from it. Unless one knows this relation, the number is useless for that person.

A good example is the concept of infinity. Most people think that infinity is an arbitrarily large number so that if you subtract ...
... infinity from infinity, you are left with zero. Only those who understand the concept of infinity clearly know that it is a mathematical concept so different from normal numbers that infinity minus infinity is also infinity.

Similar is the case with numbers. Unless what many people think, it a number in itself is good only for mathematical manipulation. But it gains meaning only when a number, or numbers, are connected to something that it represents.

A number is a number. But actually a number is a kind of a code that stands for something else. Only a knowledge of the number system and its relation to what it represents will help a person to understand the meaning of a given number.

Code manipulation is an important part of the modern world, but then that is going to be the subject of a future posting.

Shastri JC Philip, the author of this article is a physicist with specialization in quantum-nuclear physics.
Dr. Johnson C. Philip, the founder of Shastri Numismatics Academy, is an internationally known physicist, theologican, and communicator