# Real Numbers, Sequences and Series: part I:

Natural Numbers.

Natural numbers are perhaps, the earliest mathematical notions of man. The difference between a pack of wolves and one wolf, a swarm of bees and one bee, a school of fish and a single fish, a heap of stones and a single stone, etc., may have led primitive man tbo systematize the idea of numbers. The fact that in Sanskrti (and in some other ancient Indo-European languages) there are usages where one object, two objects and many objects are distinguished, example, narah, nari, naraah — indicates man’s attempt to distinguish betweeh numbers. Heaps of stones found in caves, where early man lived, and the discovery of animal bones on which notches have been cut in regular series of five are indicative of devices by the human beings of yore to keep count of their livestock. That is how they understood plurality.

But, what do we understand by numbers? Is number the same thing as plurality ? We often use expressions like “there are five fingers on my hand”, “Pandavas were five brothers”, “there are five books on this table”, “there are five mangoes in the basket”, etc. Observe what we are talking about. In the first case, we were talking about a set of fingers on my hand, in the next about a set of brothers, next about a set of books  on a table, next about a set of mangoes. But to each of these sets we attached the common attribute “five”. Why was that? There must have been something common in all these sets to justify our attaching the common attribute. The commonality between them is that the elements of one set can be put in one-to-one correspondence with the elements of the other sets under discussion.

We say that two sets A and B are equinumerous (or of the same cardinality) if there is a map

$f: A \rightarrow B$

which is one-to-one and onto, that is, a bijection. One sees that if A and B are equinumerous and the sets B and C are also equinumerous, then so are A and C. One can easily observe that being equinumerous is an equivalence relation among sets.

This relation decomposes any class of sets into disjoint equivalence classes of sets. Two sets are in the same equivalence class if they are equinumerous. The equivalence class is characterized by a common property of its members, that is, any two of them are equinmerous. This characterizing property is what we would like to call the number of elements of the set belonging to the equivalence class. Since equivalence classes, into which we have classified the sets, are disjoint, the characterizing property associated with disjoint classes are distinct. “Commonness”, “common property” or ‘characteristics” is too imprecise an idea to be handled easily; some authors have defined the number of elements of a set as the equinumerous class to which it belongs. Thus, the number “two” would mean the class of all pairs, the number “three” the class of all triplets, …and so on. But, this too has some foundational problems which are hard to circumvent. We do not go into the details of such things here.

Instead, we adopt the axioms devised by Peano for the natural numbers N with the following properties:

1) There is a map (called the successor map) from N to N, sending an element n to $n^{+}$ (called the successor of n), which is injective, that is, $n \neq m \Longrightarrow n^{+} \neq m^{+}$

2) There is an element 1 that is not a successor of any element (that is, 1 is not in the image of any successor map, that is, $1 \neq n^{+}$ for all $n \in N$). Also, every other element of N is the successor of some element of N.

3) Suppose that $A \subseteq N$ and that (a) $1 \in A$ (b) $n^{+} \in A$ whenever $n \in A$. Then, $A=N$, that is, the only subset of N which contains 1 and the successor of each of its elements in N itself.

The third axiom is known as the Principle of Mathematical Induction.

More later,

Nalin Pithwa

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