the.com/number
The original lie detector: it never blinks, never bends, and outlives every empire that counted on it.
means A mathematical value used to count, measure, or label, expressed as a word, symbol, or figure.
from From Latin 'numerus' (a count, a sum), which traveled through Old French 'nombre' into Middle English. The Latin root is thought to be related to a much older Indo-European notion of dividing out or distributing — counting as the act of doling things into shares. The 'b' in 'number' is an intruder, slipped in during its French passage to ease the pronunciation, the same way it crept into 'chamber' and 'humble.'
- zero's birth
- Zero arrived late, scandalizing ancient mathematicians as nothing
- infinite sizes
- Some infinities are provably bigger than others
- imaginary roots
- The square root of negative one runs modern electronics
- largest named
- Googolplex has more digits than atoms in the universe
- prime mystery
- Twin prime patterns remain unproven after millennia