Numbers, “essence of the world in harmony”

The Greek philosopher Pythagoras wrote the well-known phrase: “Everything is number”, for whom the number represents the essence of the world in harmony and unity, a philosophy that was deepened by Plato. For Pythagoras, understanding the world meant conceiving harmony in terms of numbers, and implied that the entire Universe, from music to the movement of the planets, could be explained with them.

Count, measure and understand nature.

Mathematicians consider that numbers have two fundamental applications, the first of which is practical, because they are used to count and measure, and the other is used by researchers in their work to understand the mysteries of nature and life, and with They deduce the movements that, as Pythagoras said, represent the essence of the world.

The origin of numbers and their concept dates back to prehistoric times, when human beings observed the relationship between the lunar phases and the growth cycles of living beings, with whose synchronized periods a language of signs that facilitated the description to follow natural phenomena.

This language became more complex as needs increased and it became essential to establish some type of record, with which the sense of number and its ability to order everything that surrounded human beings began to develop.

From the 4th, they have to teach us.

As the Canadian writer, philosopher and photographer Priya Hemenway says, in her famous book “The Secret Code”, “the first numbers were easy to express, but a specific ability to count had to be added. An adult human being is capable of counting from one to four without needing any type of learning, but research carried out on both animals and humans has shown that beyond this number they have to teach us”.

Mathematicians explain that this is where a two-stage process begins. We first developed a counting system and the ability to manipulate numbers in this system, but the information deduced from these operations must be memorized and also communicated; a way of linguistically designating individual objects then develops.

And once a system has been established and learned, at the same time that we have named and learned the objects, we devise a method of writing the numbers, which makes them much easier for us to manipulate.

Languages ​​in which there are no words that designate numbers.

However, even if there were no words or abstract concepts of numbers, over time all sorts of effective techniques have been devised to make counting easier. There are many populations in America, Asia and Africa in which their language barely has words that designate numbers, so in the administration of their affairs they use simple and rudimentary methods to enumerate.

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Even today you can see in some geographical areas how some peoples carve notches in bones or rods, draw lines, mount piles of pebbles or shells, or even mark parts of their body, such as fingers and toes, elbows , eyes or nose to register what they need.

Among the oldest devices that have been discovered to record calculations are tablets discovered around 3,200 BC. C, in the current territory of Iran and Iraq, where signs attributed to numerical values ​​were engraved in unfired clay.

The tablets found in Iran were based on a base ten counting system, while those in neighboring Iraq used base sixty. Today we still use both systems, the base 10 in our decimal system with which we count objects by tens, and the base 60 to record time in minutes and measure the degrees of a circle.

 

The “number sense” of animals.

Researchers specializing in animal behavior have shown through their experiments that certain animals have the ability to perceive quantities. This faculty is called “number sense” and it is what allows an animal to distinguish the difference in size between two small groups of similar objects or to detect that a group is not the same after having removed several objects from it.

Due to the “sense of number” it has been observed that, both in domestic and wild animals, the mothers realize if one of their young is missing from the group.

Another of the curiosities that has been discovered is that it is possible to train birds so that they are capable of determining, through movements, the number of seeds that are in different rows up to the number of five.

Priya Hemenway studied classical Greek and mathematics in Montreal, Canada, after which she began her march through India for a period of 20 years, in which she learned about ancient religions such as Buddhism, Hinduism, Sufism or ancient Christianity. Among her extensive work, “The Secret Code. The mysterious formula that governs art, nature and science”, is the one that has received the most international recognition.

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