Origin of Numbers

1. As I said, that I can't mathematically prove whether a person has knowledge about numbers or not, so well it will be better if I can ensure that knowledge is re-iterated here.
2. Well most of us can answer this question pretty easily, that numbers came into existence to get us the counts of "things".
3. Numbers don't only have this responsibility to get us the counts, they also provide us with a value to work on.
4. And even deep is the meaning of the "things" that are counted using the numbers. (Yes, its not the money you are counting using these numbers).
5. Let us take a story from the city of Mathema* to understand numbers.
6. All people in Mathema are born blind, they can't see anything. They have learnt to recognize the following shapes, by touching:
     0   1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9
7. Everyone in Mathema knows to make these shapes, and only these shapes. As all the generations in Mathema were blind, they could not communicate how many or how much they possess to anyone else by physically showing them the objects.
8. They only have the means of touching to communicate. They slowly learnt to associate each of the shapes above to the number of fingers.
9. 0 - no fingers
    1 - one finger
    2 - two fingers
    3 - three fingers
    4 - four fingers
    5 - five fingers
    6 - six fingers
    7 - seven fingers
    9 - nine fingers
10. The same association was spread to entire city slowly, communicating by touching the shapes and the number of fingers to be associated with that shape.
11. Now coming back to our world from Mathema, the shapes that were recognized by the Mathema people are just symbols, they don't have any meaning unless we provide them some meaning.
12. The meaning to these symbols were given by associating them with the number of fingers by Mathema people. This is the meaning of that symbol, and this is what we call the value of that symbol.
13. We are so used to the meaning of these symbols, that we take the shapes same as the value, they are different things.
14. So, now you must agree that we are not actually "counting" the money we have! We are counting the fingers! :)


* Mathema is the root for the word Mathematics. The city of Mathema is a creation of imagination and there is no such city by this name in past or present. If there happens to be a city with the same name, then it is purely coincidental.