> It does not make a wink of difference to your life whether the figures in your bank account or the digits on your clock are, in a philosophical sense, really real, so long as they work as expected.

Argh! It makes a crucial difference if you want not to be slaves to a dream! Beware: there's no such thing as "Tuesday". And Dollar is a small god.

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Anyhoo, operationally numbers come from counting, which comes from a cyclops matching up pebbles and sheep. Eventually someone gave names to the pebbles, and then someone (else?) realized that you could do without the actual pebbles, and there you are: numbers.

And yeah, math is very useful, culminating in the Standard Model and the Universal Machine and other fun stuff that I don't have to belabor here, eh?

Metaphysically (literally) numbers are each a kind of archetypal entity or quality (and see also "Sacred geometry") that are somehow "real" w/o being made out of any real stuff (protons, neutrons, electrons, pebbles, etc.)

It can be fun to reflect that e.g. the C language is of the same epistemological status: there are books on C, and C compilers, and C code, and so on, but the C language itself is no more (or less) real than the number two or Tuesdays.

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And yeah, Western history tends to ignore a lot of the world outside the West. This isn't confined to math. Ever try to read about African history other than Egypt?