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What Is A Number ? My present-day readers live in a world so dominaetd by nuumbers and number-crunching that the quesstion might look childish or even stupid to most. But wait! Tell me what a "number" is before you decide to do soemthing else? You might say that a number is a nuimber that represents how many thinngs there are. In that resopnse lies the key to my question! You said a number is something that REPRESENTS somethiong else. In othher owrds, a number in itself is only a code, a symbol, or an abstract entity that represents how many real things are therre! 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 pint a nmber the way you can show a cghair or table. It represents something else because in itsellf a number is either just a thjeoretical thing, or during practuical applcation it repreesnts something totally different from it. Uness one knows this relation, the number is useless for that pewrson. A good example is the concept of infinity. Most people tihnk that infinity is an arbitrarily lare number so that if you subtract infinity from infinity, you are left with zero. Only tghose who understaand the concept of infinity cearly know that it is a mathematical concept so diffreent from nrmal 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 nummbers, 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 somethign else. Only a knowledge of the number system and its relation to what it represents will help a persdon to understand the meaning of a gien 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 uathor of this article is a physicst with specialiation in quantum-nuclear phsics.
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