On Mon, Jan 23, 2023 at 05:44:06PM +0100, Michael Heerdegen wrote:
> <tomas@tuxteam.de> writes:
> 
> > Extend your sources. They aren't wrong, but they aren't right either.
> 
> BTW, treating 0 as a natural number or not reflects the difference in
> these two things: you start counting objects with 1 (the first, the
> second, ...).  OTOH counts of finite sets include 0 as the count of the
> empty set - there can be 0 objects of a certain property.
> 
> For both things you use the same set of numbers apart from 0.  It's
> of no value to argue which procedure should be the defining one for the
> natural numbers.

Absolutely agree. For me, it's more interesting as a "sociology of
mathematicians" issue. The most satisfying observation I've heard,
as I already said, is that mathematical logic and set theory tends
to zero-counting (that would somewhat explain computer science's
affinity to that).

But as I said, in my experience (Germany), it runs across whole
faculties. "Our" algebra or analysis folks were zero-counters, too.

But it might be incomplete.

Cheers
-- 
t