the naturals were the same as the integers



I thought it was non-negative integers.



Most of us (me included) learn a thing and think "well, that's the way it is." And we have a strong inclination (especially me) to think that opposing views are necessarily wrong.


What *I* learned:
N = Natural Numbers > 0
W = Whole Numbers >= 0
J = Integers = any non-fractional number
-- yet another thing ... sometimes they use the symbol I to mean integers
while my daughter is in pre-algebra in 7th grade and they use
J(n) to represent integers.

What this woman learned was that N = J. I was sure she was mistaken, but after spending a few hours in our company library I found a real math book that used her definition. (Which I meantion as the last post in that long thread of usenet posts I pointed to in my last message.)

Yet another weirdness which probably most awad readers are aware of, but don't think about very much. In 8th grade algebra, I learned that sqrt(-1) = i, but later, in engineering school, they used j for that.

It doesn't really matter how the terms are defined, so long as the terms are established early. Makes it difficult to interpret something when you come into it with no point of reference. That's obviously why they try to standardize some things.

k