Quotation

One to Nine

the Inner Life of Numbers
Hopeless to select best quotes because of the vast variety of interests. Here is a small sample: Indian mathematicians have a self-deprecating joke: ‘India contributed zero to mathematics.’ The joke plays on the unnatural language of zero. Contributing ‘zero’ is not the same as contributing zero: ‘zero’ is something! This joke is also the basis of a simpler approach to the logic of numbers. Take Zero to be the empty set, the set containing nothing. Then One is the set containing just one thing: namely Zero. Then, Zero and One give two things… === That NOT (NOT A) is the same as A also requires this peculiar precision. Alan Turing suggested explaining it by saying, ‘It’s like crossing the road. You cross it, and then you cross it again, and you’re back where you started.’ But in real life, we often can’t get no such logical satisfaction. Two wrongs make no rights, ...