Mathematicians obviously know nothing (nil?) about natural numbers. :-) Amer Math Monthly has a picture of the Fields Medal, which has the date MCNXXXIII, which mistakenly uses "N" instead of "M". Apparently, all 44 awarded medals have this same error. Perhaps all of you should check your medals for this flaw. A non-mathematician, Alan Chodos of the American Physical Society noticed that: "There could also be a danger to teaching too much math. In many states, the proceeds from the lottery go to education. If you teach people about probability, they'll be much less likely to play the lottery. So paradoxically, the better you teach math, the less funding you may have to teach it." Math. Magazine, April 2006. At 09:22 AM 4/12/2006, Schroeppel, Richard wrote:

A note from Dylan Thurston <dthurston@barnard.edu>: -----

My favorite example is even earlier: in elementary school or middle school, we were learning about the "natural", "counting", and "whole" numbers. (These are varieties of positive/nonnegative integers.) I had a little trouble keeping them straight, and so I asked my father (also a mathematician) which was which. He didn't know and said he used "positive" or "nonnegative"; that made me think something was fishy. I don't think mathematicians are consistent about whether the natural numbers (N) include 0 or not; I suspect this occassionally leads to confusion. Peace, Dylan