Читать книгу Basic Math & Pre-Algebra All-in-One For Dummies (+ Chapter Quizzes Online) - Mark Zegarelli - Страница 13

Although humans invented numbers for counting commodities, as I explain in the preceding section, they soon put them to use in a wide range of applications. Numbers were useful for measuring distances, counting money, amassing armies, levying taxes, building pyramids, and lots more.

But beyond their many uses for understanding the external world, numbers have an internal order all their own. So numbers are not only an invention, but equally a discovery: a landscape reflecting fundamental truths about nature, and how humans think about it, that seems to exist independently, with its own structure, mysteries, and even perils.

One path into this new and often strange world is the number sequence: an arrangement of numbers according to a rule. In the following sections, I introduce you to a variety of number sequences that are useful for making sense of numbers.