Talk:Counting

Does Wikipedia have an article for this?

Does Wikipedia have an article on things that are counted in a way like this:

1, 2, 3, 4, 5A, 5B...

(Description: Some of the items being counted are designated as a single item with multiple parts designated with letters.) In the real world, I hear that there are a lot of things numbered like this. 66.245.66.35 20:36, 10 April 2004 (UTC)

Yes, these are commonly used in outlines as a numbering scheme ... but alas, neither of those articles says anything about it. (Is there a better name for this than "outline numbering" ?).

Also, I've seen a few books that, instead of numbering pages from "1" and incrementing all the way to the end, start with "1:1", "1:2", ..., then the first page of chapter 2 resets to "2:1", then "2:2", then "2:3", ... Is there a better name for this than "per-chapter numbering" ?

--DavidCary 22:44, 23 April 2005 (UTC)

This is a form of segmented numbering. The page number consists of multiple segments, which are concatenated to define the unique page number. As discussed below, this is enumeration (listing the items), not counting. There is the concept of a "rollup" in business computing which adds up the items in a specific segment. You usually cannot compare the items in distinct rollups (apples versus oranges), which can be in different classes. Ancheta Wis 00:50, 25 April 2005 (UTC)

Sorry, this is not counting. This is one-to-many correspondence, which fails the basic idea of 1-to-1 correspondence required for the counting operation in mathematics. The technology for 1-to-many correspondence is a topic in database management systems, where the 5A and 5B referred-to above, have just defined a primary key (PK, which is not a number, its a sequence of symobols, defined for each type) for the things being listed. The good news is that once a PK is defined for a set of the things, you can start to run searches on the set, just like the technology used to operate Wikipedia. Ancheta Wis 00:50, 25 April 2005 (UTC) The reason that WP works so well, though, is not the database. It's the SQUIDs which simply save all the existing searches to disk. When an original query is requested, that is what takes up the database search time in WP. Once the item's PK's are saved, the items can be cached to the SQUIDs. Ancheta Wis 00:50, 25 April 2005 (UTC)

What you describe is not a one-to-many correspondence. It is indeed one-to-one. Your digression about databases isn't really helpful; the idea of primary keys is about uniqueness. There's no need for that here, since the elements are already unique. Simply map each one to a natural number: 1->1, 2->2, 3->3, 4->4, 5A->5, 5B->6. Now I have an enumeration of the list. Whether or not this enumeration can be said to be counting is kind of academic. 70.247.160.102 (talk) 06:33, 21 February 2010 (UTC)

Requesting removal or edit of Jesus reference

How can theologically-entangled beliefs held by Bible scholars (about the timing of this event in the "Gospel" accounts) authentically inform us about Jewish methods of counting? Lyobovnik (talk) 00:37, 12 May 2012 (UTC)

Definition

"Counting is the action of finding the number of elements of a finite set of objects." So does that include estimating? Burchman (talk) 13:04, 13 July 2013 (UTC)

   IM( far from entirely unsophisticated )O, counting has two stages, of development and of use, for the manipulation of the cardinal numbers; I have not been formally taught philosophy of math, and do not officially hold a degree in (even non-philosophical) math. Officially, my BA (the college, at least then, granted only undergrad liberal-arts-and-sciences degrees: I.e., Bachelor of Arts degrees, whether with concentration in a technical or humanistic field of study. I was given to understand that there’d been very serious schemes for where they’d have built additional buildings to accommodate the additional faculty members and original research that such broadening would require, given their stated commitment to liberal arts educations, would not be consistent with maintaining an acceptably high level of scholarly and pedagogical rigor. JerzyA (talk) 22:38, 3 January 2020 (UTC)

Disagreement re comment on fortnight and sennight

Re the comment: "In contrast, the English word 'fortnight' itself derives from 'a fourteen-night', as the archaic 'sennight' does from 'a seven-night'; the English words are not examples of inclusive counting." I disagree with this opinion i.e. "the English words are not examples of inclusive counting" They reference the 14th night and 7th night respectively hence they are archaic examples of inclusive counting among the Celts as this link supports re "sennight" for example http://www.infoplease.com/dictionary/brewers/sennight.html. So I think that error should be corrected.--Immutable888 (talk) 03:02, 10 August 2016 (UTC)