natural numbers?

Question

i have an extra credit assignment and i cant find the answer ,i need to find out why natural numbers are called natural?

Answer 1

One of the set of positive whole numbers; a positive integer.An empty set is a set that has no elements.
Natural Numbers, Positive Integers

The distinction is one that isn't going to matter even to
mathematicians most of the time. It matters only when we're concerned
with what's called "the foundations of mathematics." A number of
mathematicians in the late nineteenth century started to wonder about
how mathematics could be built up from the simplest possible
foundations. The starting point was what we call the "natural
numbers." They're called "natural" because they're so universal and
apparently so obvious that they seem to be given to us by nature.
Everybody in every culture has always known how to count. But not
every culture has always had negative numbers, fractions, etc.

Now if you start with just the natural numbers, you don't have any
zero or any negative numbers. Zero and negative numbers were really
invented by mathematicians so they could do subtraction without having
to think about whether or not the number they were subtracting was
smaller than the number they were subtracting from. All this happened
a very long time ago, of course. But these nineteenth-century
mathematicians started worrying about where these new numbers came
from and they figured out a way to manufacture the new numbers out
of the natural numbers. The new set of numbers they constructed were
the integers (positive, negative, and zero). And lo and behold, the
positive integers, that is those new numbers which happened to be
greater than zero, turned out to form a system that looked exactly
like the old system of natural numbers. It had exactly the same
properties, and its smallest member behaved exactly like the natural
number 1, even though it was built by a somewhat complicated
construction and was by no means identical to the natural number 1.

Similar methods were used to build rational numbers out of integers
and real numbers out of rational numbers. At each stage of the
process the numbers of the previous stage acquire images in the new
set of numbers which behave exactly like their predecessors but are
technically not identical to them.

Once this whole structure has been built up, we can pretty much forget
about it and go on with our lives, treating the natural numbers, the
integers, and the rational numbers as all just parts of the bigger
structure of real numbers.

Answer 2

They're called "natural" because they're so universal and
apparently so obvious that they seem to be given to us by nature.
Everybody in every culture has always known how to count. But not
every culture has always had negative numbers, fractions, etc.

Now if you start with just the natural numbers, you don't have any
zero or any negative numbers. Zero and negative numbers were really
invented by mathematicians so they could do subtraction without having
to think about whether or not the number they were subtracting was
smaller than the number they were subtracting from. All this happened
a very long time ago, of course. But these nineteenth-century
mathematicians started worrying about where these new numbers came
from and they figured out a way to manufacture the new numbers out
of the natural numbers. The new set of numbers they constructed were
the integers (positive, negative, and zero). And lo and behold, the
positive integers, that is those new numbers which happened to be
greater than zero, turned out to form a system that looked exactly
like the old system of natural numbers. It had exactly the same
properties, and its smallest member behaved exactly like the natural
number 1, even though it was built by a somewhat complicated
construction and was by no means identical to the natural number 1.

Similar methods were used to build rational numbers out of integers
and real numbers out of rational numbers. At each stage of the
process the numbers of the previous stage acquire images in the new
set of numbers which behave exactly like their predecessors but are
technically not identical to them.

Once this whole structure has been built up, we can pretty much forget
about it and go on with our lives, treating the natural numbers, the
integers, and the rational numbers as all just parts of the bigger
structure of real numbers.

Answer 3

Natural numbers are positive integers only, 0,1,2,3,4,5, etc. The addition of 0 as a natural number came later, by mathematical convention.

They're so called because those are the numbers we use to count natural things. It's difficult to make sense of negative numbers, irrationals, complex numbers, in counting "natural" things like sheep.

Answer 4

Natural numbers have two main purposes: they can be used for counting ("there are 3 apples on the table"), and they can be used for ordering ("this is the 3rd largest city in the country"). The definition is: One of the set of positive whole numbers; a positive integer.

The natural numbers presumably had their origins in the words used to count things, beginning with the number one.

The first major advance in abstraction was the use of numerals to represent numbers. This allowed systems to be developed for recording large numbers. For example, the Babylonians developed a powerful place-value system based essentially on the numerals for 1 and 10. The ancient Egyptians had a system of numerals with distinct hieroglyphs for 1, 10, and all the powers of 10 up to one million. A stone carving from Karnak, dating from around 1500 BC and now at the Louvre in Paris, depicts 276 as 2 hundreds, 7 tens, and 6 ones; and similarly for the number 4,622.

For more information, go to:
http://www.math.utah.edu/~pa/math/numbers.html
http://www.answers.com/topic/natural-number

Answer 5

organic numbers: a million,2,3,... total numbers: organic numbers which incorporate 0 integers: 0, a million, -a million ,2, -2,... (total numbers and their negatives) rational numbers: if a and b are integers (b isn't 0) then a/b is a rational numbers genuine numbers: the crowning glory of the rational numbers (somewhat extra state-of-the-paintings to describe completely) irrational numbers: genuine numbers that are no longer additionally rational numbers, working example ?2

Answer 6

Cuz, Natural Numbers are numbers that are (1,2,3,..... and so on)
and they are normal numbers that you would use that dont have decimals or fractions or anything they are just plain numbers and are natural. They are not 0 because 0 is a whole number!

Answer 7

This is simple, they are the numbers which are the primary, used in about anithing, they are: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, etc.

Answer 8

They're the antithesis of unnatural numbers. You know, numbers that do unspeakable things.