A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
I just found out about this debate and it's patently absurd. The ISO 80000-2 standard defines ℕ as including 0 and it's foundational in basically all of mathematics and computer science. Excluding 0 is a fringe position and shouldn't be taken seriously.
I could be completely wrong, but I doubt any of my (US) professors would reference an ISO definition, and may not even know it exists. Mathematicians in my experience are far less concerned about the terminology or symbols used to describe something as long as they’re clearly defined. In fact, they’ll probably make up their own symbology just because it’s slightly more convenient for their proof.
My experience (bachelor's in math and physics, but I went into physics) is that if you want to be clear about including zero or not you add a subscript or superscript to specify. For non-negative integers you add a subscript zero (ℕ_0). For strictly positive natural numbers you can either do ℕ_1 or ℕ^+.
I hate those guys. I had that one prof at uni and he reinvented every possible symbol and everything was so different. It was a pita to learn from external material.
they’ll probably make up their own symbology just because it’s slightly more convenient for their proof
I feel so thoroughly called out RN. 😂
Ehh, among American academic mathematicians, including 0 is the fringe position. It's not a "debate," it's just a different convention. There are numerous ISO standards which would be highly unusual in American academia.
FWIW I was taught that the inclusion of 0 is a French tradition.
I'm an American mathematician, and I've never experienced a situation where 0 being an element of the Naturals was called out. It's less ubiquitous than I'd like it to be, but at worst they're considered equally viable conventions of notation or else undecided.
I've always used N to indicate the naturals including 0, and that's what was taught to me in my foundations class.
The US is one of 3 countries on the planet that still stubbornly primarily uses imperial units. "The US doesn't do it that way" isn't a great argument for not adopting a standard.
Well, you can naturally have zero of something. In fact, you have zero of most things right now.
How do you know so much about my life?
But there are an infinite number of things that you don't have any of, so if you count them all together the number is actually not zero (because zero times infinity is undefined).
the standard (set theoretic) construction of the natural numbers starts with 0 (the empty set) and then builds up the other numbers from there. so to me it seems “natural” to include it in the set of natural numbers.
On top of that, I don't think it's particularly useful to have 2 different easy shorthands for the positive integers, when it means that referring to the union of the positive integers and the singleton of 0 becomes cumbersome as a result.
Counterpoint: if you say you have a number of things, you have at least two things, so maybe 1 is not a number either. (I'm going to run away and hide now)
I'm willing to die on this hill with you because I find it hilarious
I think if you ask any mathematician (or any academic that uses math professionally, for that matter), 0 is a natural number.
There is nothing natural about not having an additive identity in your semiring.
In school i was taught that ℕ contained 0 and ℕ* was ℕ without 0
I was taught ℕ did not contain 0 and that ℕ₀ is ℕ with 0.
ℕ₀* is ℕ with 0 without 0
Why do we even use natural numbers as a subset?
There are whole numbers already
I'd learned somewhere along the line that Natural numbers (that is, the set ℕ) are all the positive integers and zero. Without zero, I was told this were the Whole numbers. I see on wikipedia (as I was digging up that Unicode symbol) that this is contested now. Seems very silly.
I think whole numbers don't really exist outside of US high schools. Never learnt about them or seen them in a book/paper at least.
I like how whenever there's a pedantic viral math "problem" half of the replies are just worshiping one answer blindly because that's how their school happened to teach it.
It is a natural number. Is there an argument for it not being so?
Well I’m convinced. That was a surprisingly well reasoned video.
Thanks for linking this video! It lays out all of the facts nicely, so you can come to your own decision
Definition of natural numbers is the same as non-negative numbers, so of course 0 is a natural number.
In some countries, zero is neither positive nor negative. But in others, it is both positive and negative. So saying the set of natural number is the same as non-negative [integers] doesn't really help. (Also, obviously not everyone would even agree that with that definition regardless of whether zero is negative.)
But -0 is also 0, so it can't be natural number.
0 is not a natural number. 0 is a whole number.
The set of whole numbers is the union of the set of natural numbers and 0.
Does the set of whole numbers not include negatives now? I swear it used to do
N0
I have been taught and everyone around me accepts that Natural numbers start from 1 and Whole numbers start from 0
Wait, I thought everything in math is rigorously and unambiguously defined?
There's a hole at the bottom of math.
There’s a frog on the log on the hole on the bottom of math. There’s a frog on the log on the hole on the bottom of math. A frog. A frog. There’s a frog on the log on the hole on the bottom of math.
Rigorously, yes. Unambiguously, no. Plenty of words (like continuity) can mean different things in different contexts. The important thing isn’t the word, it’s that the word has a clear definition within the context of a proof. Obviously you want to be able to communicate ideas clearly and so a convention of symbols and terms have been established over time, but conventions can change over time too.
Negative Zero stole my heart
Zero grew up from the seeds of the undefined, just like negative numbers and people who refuse to accept that the square root only has one value. Undefined is a pathway to many abilities some would consider unnatural.
As a programmer, I'm ashamed to admit that the correct answer is no. If zero was natural we wouldn't have needed 10s of thousands of years to invent it.
Did we need to invent it, or did it just take that long to discover it? I mean “nothing” has always been around and there’s a lot we didn’t discover till much more recently that already existed.
As a programmer, I'd ask you to link your selected version of definition of natural number along with your request because I can't give a fuck to guess