![]() We could continue forever into one direction, but what if we want to go the other way? What is less than 1? Of course there is “nothing”, but can “nothing” really be a number, i.e. Natural numbers have many beautiful properties, and these are investigated in an area of mathematics called Number theory. The natural numbers are 1, 2, 3, 4, … There are infinitely many natural numbers: we can simply keep adding 1 to the previous number to get more and more. ![]() ![]() They are also the first part of mathematics we learn at schools. Yet integers are some of the simplest, most intuitive and most beautiful objects in mathematics. Of course he was wrong: underlying nature are not discrete integers but continuous functions. “God made the integers all else is the work of man.” This is a famous quote by the German mathematician Leopold Kronecker (1823 – 1891).
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