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Comment by empath75 | Hacker News Reader

The question is when they used it or understood it _as a number_. The greeks didn't even consider 1 to be a number, since "number" implied a "multitude". It was controversial as to whether 1 was a number up until the 1400s or 1500s, let alone zero.

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This feels wrong, at face value. Even in modern English, if I say I have a number of things, I almost certainly don't have just one. This does /not/ mean that one is not a number. It /does/ mean that the word "number" can have several uses.

more here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-mathematics/#10

But this doesn't contend with my point? A sibling point brought up confusion of cardinal and ordinal numbers. In modern english, I challenge you to find a good understanding outside of advanced practitioners on the difference.

I think it is fair to say that my statement is too strong to say it is wrong. My assertion would be that it is more complicated and almost certainly there is a lot lost in translation along the years.

Euclid distinguishes the unit (VII, Def.1) and number -- a multitude composed of units -- (VII, Def.2). His definition of prime and composite numbers (VII, Def.11 and Def.13) clearly exclude one from the group of numbers, otherwise every number would be composite.

I think this is good to argue that my assertion is likely too strong. I fear this is close to arguing that early programmers were not familiar with map/flatMap. They did not discuss it as a first class thing, sure. Was it completely alien to all practitioners? I find that harder to swallow and it is likely that we are debating methods versus functions completely removed from the context in which the words were largely used.

thank you! i was wondering about that

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