I interrupted my chain of thought on the philosophy of mathematics by reading some published material on that topic. I had “told myself” that I should avoid doing this, in the interest of keeping my thoughts fresh and free of any confusion that could come
As another example of the possibility of confusing number classes, consider the difference between 5 apple trees containing 100 apples each, and 100 apple trees containing 5 apples each. The equality of the number of apples in each of these cases is asserted in the
In the discussion of signed integers, it was noted that the nature of arithmetic involved in their use was fundamentally different than arithmetic performed with natural numbers. This fact is a result of a deeper distinction between these numbering systems. A natural number is not