How Inevitable Is the Concept of Numbers?—Stephen Wolfram Writings
How Inevitable Is the Concept of Numbers? May 25, 2021 Everyone Has to Have Numbers… Don’t They? The aliens arrive in a starship. Surely, one might think, to have all that technology they must have the idea of numbers. Or maybe one finds an uncontacted tribe deep in the jungle. Surely they too must have the idea of numbers. To us numbers seem so natural—and “obvious”—that it’s hard to imagine everyone wouldn’t have them. But if one digs a little deeper, it’s not so clear. It’s said that there are human languages that have words for “one”, “a pair” and “many”, b...
Source: stephenwolfram.com