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Dominion General Discussion / Re: Random city question
« on: February 02, 2013, 04:46:33 pm »I'm not a coder, but as a mathematician I know that you should start counting from 0
That depends on whether you think the natural numbers begin at 1 or 0.
For the purposes of the Well Ordering Principle (WOP), most textbooks start the natural numbers at 1.
Being a coder as well as a mathematician, I still vote for starting City at 0.
Do you really think most textbooks start at 1? Whenever I've taught those classes, we've started with 0. When you build your set-theoretic model, you begin with the empty set as zero, and then define the successor operation as Sx = {x}.
I'll concede that I haven't read any sort of majority of textbooks, so I should not have said most.
Instead, I'll say that every single advanced mathematical textbook I've ever used starts the natural numbers at one.