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In mathematics, the natural numbers are the numbers 0, 1, 2, 3, and so on, possibly excluding 0. Some start counting with 0, defining the natural numbers as the non-negative integers , while others start with 1, defining them as the positive integers Some authors acknowledge both definitions whenever convenient. Sometimes, the whole numbers are the natural numbers as well as zero. In other cases, the whole numbers refer to all of the , including negative integers. The counting numbers are another term for the natural numbers, particularly in primary education, and are ambiguous as well although typically start at 1.

The natural numbers are used for counting things, like "there are six coins on the table", in which case they are called . They are also used to put things in order, like "this is the third largest city in the country", which are called . Natural numbers are also used as labels, like jersey numbers on a sports team, where they serve as and do not have mathematical properties.

The natural numbers form a set, commonly symbolized as a bold or blackboard bold . Many other are built from the natural numbers. For example, the are made by adding 0 and negative numbers. The add fractions, and the add all infinite decimals. add the Imaginary unit. This chain of extensions canonically Embedding the natural numbers in the other number systems. says: "The whole fantastic hierarchy of number systems is built up by purely set-theoretic means from a few simple assumptions about natural numbers.": "Numbers make up the foundation of mathematics."

Natural numbers are studied in different areas of math. Number theory looks at things like how numbers divide evenly (divisibility), or how are spread out. Combinatorics studies counting and arranging numbered objects, such as partitions and enumerations.

History

Ancient roots

The most primitive method of representing a natural number is to use one's fingers, as in finger counting. Putting down a tally mark for each object is another primitive method. Later, a set of objects could be tested for equality, excess or shortage—by striking out a mark and removing an object from the set.

The first major advance in abstraction was the use of numeral system to represent numbers. This allowed systems to be developed for recording large numbers. The ancient Egyptians developed a powerful system of numerals with distinct hieroglyphs for 1, 10, and all powers of 10 up to over 1 million. A stone carving from Karnak, dating back from around 1500 BCE and now at the Louvre in Paris, depicts 276 as 2 hundreds, 7 tens, and 6 ones; and similarly for the number 4,622. The had a place-value system based essentially on the numerals for 1 and 10, using base sixty, so that the symbol for sixty was the same as the symbol for one—its value being determined from context.

Georges Ifrah (2025). 9780471375685, Wiley. ISBN 9780471375685

A much later advance was the development of the idea that can be considered as a number, with its own numeral. The use of a 0 numerical digit in place-value notation (within other numbers) dates back as early as 700 BCE by the Babylonians, who omitted such a digit when it would have been the last symbol in the number. The Olmec and Maya civilizations used 0 as a separate number as early as the , but this usage did not spread beyond Mesoamerica.

Charles C. Mann (2025). 9781400040063, Knopf. . ISBN 9781400040063

Brian Evans (2025). 9781118853979, John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 9781118853979

The use of a numeral 0 in modern times originated with the Indian mathematician Brahmagupta in 628 CE. However, 0 had been used as a number in the medieval computus (the calculation of the date of Easter), beginning with Dionysius Exiguus in 525 CE, without being denoted by a numeral. Standard Roman numerals do not have a symbol for 0; instead, nulla (or the genitive form nullae) from nullus, the Latin word for "none", was employed to denote a 0 value.

The first systematic study of numbers as is usually credited to the ancient Greece philosophers Pythagoras and Archimedes. Some Greek mathematicians treated the number 1 differently than larger numbers, sometimes even not as a number at all. Euclid, for example, defined a unit first and then a number as a multitude of units, thus by his definition, a unit is not a number and there are no unique numbers (e.g., any two units from indefinitely many units is a 2).

Ian Mueller (2025). 9780486453002, Dover Publications. ISBN 9780486453002

However, in the definition of perfect number which comes shortly afterward, Euclid treats 1 as a number like any other. In definition VII.3 a "part" was defined as a number, but here 1 is considered to be a part, so that for example is a perfect number.

Independent studies on numbers also occurred at around the same time in India, China, and Mesoamerica.

Morris Kline (1990). 9780195061352, Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780195061352

Emergence as a term

Nicolas Chuquet used the term progression naturelle (natural progression) in 1484. The earliest known use of "natural number" as a complete English phrase is in 1763. The 1771 Encyclopaedia Britannica defines natural numbers in the logarithm article.

Starting at 0 or 1 has long been a matter of definition. In 1727, Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle wrote that his notions of distance and element led to defining the natural numbers as including or excluding 0. In 1889, Giuseppe Peano used N for the positive integers and started at 1, but he later changed to using N₀ and N₁. Historically, most definitions have excluded 0, but many mathematicians such as George A. Wentworth, Bertrand Russell, Nicolas Bourbaki, Paul Halmos, Stephen Cole Kleene, and John Horton Conway have preferred to include 0.

Mathematicians have noted tendencies in which definition is used, such as algebra texts including 0, number theory and analysis texts excluding 0,

(2021). 9783030838997, Springer Nature. . ISBN 9783030838997

See, for example, or logic and set theory texts including 0,

(2025). 9780691118802, Princeton university press. ISBN 9780691118802

(1998). 9780412606106, Chapman & Hall/CRC. . ISBN 9780412606106

dictionaries excluding 0, school books (through high-school level) excluding 0, and upper-division college-level books including 0.

(1977). 9780122384400, Academic Press. ISBN 9780122384400

There are exceptions to each of these tendencies and as of 2023 no formal survey has been conducted. Arguments raised include division by zero and the size of the empty set. Computer languages often start from zero when enumerating items like For loop and string- or array-elements. Including 0 began to rise in popularity in the 1960s. The ISO 31-11 standard included 0 in the natural numbers in its first edition in 1978 and this has continued through its present edition as ISO 80000-2.

Formal construction

In 19th century Europe, there was mathematical and philosophical discussion about the exact nature of the natural numbers. Henri Poincaré stated that axioms can only be demonstrated in their finite application, and concluded that it is "the power of the mind" which allows conceiving of the indefinite repetition of the same act. Leopold Kronecker summarized his belief as "God made the integers, all else is the work of man".

The constructivists saw a need to improve upon the logical rigor in the foundations of mathematics. In the 1860s, Hermann Grassmann suggested a recursive definition for natural numbers, thus stating they were not really natural—but a consequence of definitions. Later, two classes of such formal definitions emerged, using set theory and Peano's axioms respectively. Later still, they were shown to be equivalent in most practical applications.

Set-theoretical definitions of natural numbers were initiated by Gottlob Frege. He initially defined a natural number as the class of all sets that are in one-to-one correspondence with a particular set. However, this definition turned out to lead to paradoxes, including Russell's paradox. To avoid such paradoxes, the formalism was modified so that a natural number is defined as a particular set, and any set that can be put into one-to-one correspondence with that set is said to have that number of elements.

In 1881, Charles Sanders Peirce provided the first axiomatization of natural-number arithmetic.

Paul Shields (1997). 9780253330208, Indiana University Press. . ISBN 9780253330208

In 1888, Richard Dedekind proposed another axiomatization of natural-number arithmetic, and in 1889, Peano published a simplified version of Dedekind's axioms in his book The principles of arithmetic presented by a new method (). This approach is now called Peano arithmetic. It is based on an axiomatization of the properties of : each natural number has a successor and every non-zero natural number has a unique predecessor. Peano arithmetic is equiconsistent with several weak systems of set theory. One such system is ZFC with the axiom of infinity replaced by its negation. Theorems that can be proved in ZFC but cannot be proved using the Peano Axioms include Goodstein's theorem.

Notation

The set of all natural numbers is standardly denoted or

\mathbb N.

Older texts have occasionally employed as the symbol for this set.

W. Rudin (1976). 9780070542358, McGraw-Hill. . ISBN 9780070542358

Since natural numbers may contain or not, it may be important to know which version is referred to. This is often specified by the context, but may also be done by using a subscript or a superscript in the notation, possibly with reference to the Examples include:

Naturals without zero ( $\{1,2,...\}$ ): $\mathbb{N}^*$ , $\mathbb{N}_{>0}$ , $\mathbb{Z}_{>0}$ , $\mathbb{Z}^{\ge 1}$ , $\mathbb{N}^{\ge 1}$ ,
(2025). 9783736980730, Cuvillier Verlag. ISBN 9783736980730
$\mathbb Z^+$ ,
(2025). 9780201726343, Pearson Addison Wesley. ISBN 9780201726343
$\mathbb N^+$ ,
(2019). 9781108488068, Cambridge University Press. . ISBN 9781108488068
$\mathbb{N}_1$ .
Naturals with zero ( $\;\{0,1,2,...\}$ ): $\mathbb{Z}^{\ge 0}$ , $\mathbb{N}^{\ge 0}$ , $\mathbb{N}_0$ ,
(2015). 9780191016486, OUP Oxford. . ISBN 9780191016486
$\mathbb N^0$ ,
(2025). 9788120841680, Motilal Banarsidass. . ISBN 9788120841680
$\mathbb Z^{0+}$ .
(2022). 9781800611825, World Scientific. . ISBN 9781800611825

Properties

This section uses the convention

\mathbb{N}=\mathbb{N}_0=\mathbb{N}^*\cup\{0\}

Addition

Given the set

\mathbb{N}

of natural numbers and the successor function

S \colon \mathbb{N} \to \mathbb{N}

sending each natural number to the next one, one can define addition of natural numbers recursively by setting and for all , . Thus, , , and so on. The algebraic structure

(\mathbb{N}, +)

is a commutative monoid with identity element 0. It is a free object on one generator. This commutative monoid satisfies the cancellation property, so it can be embedded in a group. The smallest group containing the natural numbers is the .

If 1 is defined as , then . That is, is simply the successor of .

Multiplication

Analogously, given that addition has been defined, a multiplication operator

\times

can be defined via and . This turns

(\mathbb{N}^*, \times)

into a free commutative monoid with identity element 1; a generator set for this monoid is the set of .

Relationship between addition and multiplication

Addition and multiplication are compatible, which is expressed in the distributivity: . These properties of addition and multiplication make the natural numbers an instance of a commutative semiring. Semirings are an algebraic generalization of the natural numbers where multiplication is not necessarily commutative. The lack of additive inverses, which is equivalent to the fact that

\mathbb{N}

is not closed under subtraction (that is, subtracting one natural from another does not always result in another natural), means that

\mathbb{N}

is not a ring; instead it is a semiring (also known as a rig).

If the natural numbers are taken as "excluding 0", and "starting at 1", the definitions of + and × are as above, except that they begin with and . Furthermore, $(\mathbb{N^*}, +)$ has no identity element.

Order

In this section, juxtaposed variables such as indicate the product , and the standard order of operations is assumed.

A total order on the natural numbers is defined by letting if and only if there exists another natural number where . This order is compatible with the arithmetical operations in the following sense: if , and are natural numbers and , then and .

An important property of the natural numbers is that they are : every non-empty set of natural numbers has a least element. The rank among well-ordered sets is expressed by an ordinal number; for the natural numbers, this is denoted as (omega).

Division

In this section, juxtaposed variables such as indicate the product , and the standard order of operations is assumed.

While it is in general not possible to divide one natural number by another and get a natural number as result, the procedure of division with remainder or Euclidean division is available as a substitute: for any two natural numbers and with there are natural numbers and such that

a = bq + r \text{ and } r < b.

The number is called the quotient and is called the remainder of the division of by . The numbers and are uniquely determined by and . This Euclidean division is key to the several other properties (divisibility), algorithms (such as the Euclidean algorithm), and ideas in number theory.

Algebraic properties satisfied by the natural numbers

The addition (+) and multiplication (×) operations on natural numbers as defined above have several algebraic properties:

Closure under addition and multiplication: for all natural numbers and , both and are natural numbers.
(2014). 9781483280790, Elsevier. . ISBN 9781483280790
Associativity: for all natural numbers , , and , and .
Commutativity: for all natural numbers and , and .
Existence of : for every natural number , and .

If the natural numbers are taken as "excluding 0", and "starting at 1", then for every natural number , . However, the "existence of additive identity element" property is not satisfied

Distributivity of multiplication over addition for all natural numbers , , and , .
No nonzero : if and are natural numbers such that , then or (or both).

Generalizations

Two important generalizations of natural numbers arise from the two uses of counting and ordering: and .

A natural number can be used to express the size of a finite set; more precisely, a cardinal number is a measure for the size of a set, which is even suitable for infinite sets. The numbering of cardinals usually begins at zero, to accommodate the empty set $\emptyset$ . This concept of "size" relies on maps between sets, such that two sets have equinumerosity, exactly if there exists a bijection between them. The set of natural numbers itself, and any bijective image of it, is said to be countable set and to have cardinality aleph-null ().
Natural numbers are also used as linguistic ordinal numbers: "first", "second", "third", and so forth. The numbering of ordinals usually begins at zero, to accommodate the order type of the empty set $\emptyset$ . This way they can be assigned to the elements of a totally ordered finite set, and also to the elements of any countably infinite set without limit points. This assignment can be generalized to general well-orderings with a cardinality beyond countability, to yield the ordinal numbers. An ordinal number may also be used to describe the notion of "size" for a well-ordered set, in a sense different from cardinality: if there is an order isomorphism (more than a bijection) between two well-ordered sets, they have the same ordinal number. The first ordinal number that is not a natural number is expressed as ; this is also the ordinal number of the set of natural numbers itself.

The least ordinal of cardinality (that is, the initial ordinal of ) is but many well-ordered sets with cardinal number have an ordinal number greater than .

For finite set well-ordered sets, there is a one-to-one correspondence between ordinal and cardinal numbers; therefore they can both be expressed by the same natural number, the number of elements of the set. This number can also be used to describe the position of an element in a larger finite, or an infinite, sequence.

A countable non-standard model of arithmetic satisfying the Peano Arithmetic (that is, the first-order Peano axioms) was developed by Skolem in 1933. The hypernatural numbers are an uncountable model that can be constructed from the ordinary natural numbers via the ultrapower construction. Other generalizations are discussed in .

Georges Reeb used to claim provocatively that "The naïve integers don't fill up $\mathbb{N}$ ".

Formal definitions

There are two standard methods for formally defining natural numbers. The first one, named for Giuseppe Peano, consists of an autonomous axiomatic theory called Peano arithmetic, based on few axioms called Peano axioms.

The second definition is based on set theory. It defines the natural numbers as specific sets. More precisely, each natural number is defined as an explicitly defined set, whose elements allow counting the elements of other sets, in the sense that the sentence "a set has elements" means that there exists a one to one correspondence between the two sets and .

The sets used to define natural numbers satisfy Peano axioms. It follows that every theorem that can be stated and proved in Peano arithmetic can also be proved in set theory. However, the two definitions are not equivalent, as there are theorems that can be stated in terms of Peano arithmetic and proved in set theory, which are not provable inside Peano arithmetic. A probable example is Fermat's Last Theorem.

The definition of the integers as sets satisfying Peano axioms provide a model of Peano arithmetic inside set theory. An important consequence is that, if set theory is consistent (as it is usually guessed), then Peano arithmetic is consistent. In other words, if a contradiction could be proved in Peano arithmetic, then set theory would be contradictory, and every theorem of set theory would be both true and wrong.

Peano axioms

The five Peano axioms are the following:

0 is a natural number.
Every natural number has a successor which is also a natural number.
0 is not the successor of any natural number.
If the successor of $x$ equals the successor of $y$ , then $x$ equals $y$ .
The axiom of induction: If a statement is true of 0, and if the truth of that statement for a number implies its truth for the successor of that number, then the statement is true for every natural number.

These are not the original axioms published by Peano, but are named in his honor. Some forms of the Peano axioms have 1 in place of 0. In ordinary arithmetic, the successor of $x$ is $x + 1$ .

Set-theoretic definition

Intuitively, the natural number is the common property of all sets that have elements. So, it seems natural to define as an equivalence class under the relation "can be made in one to one correspondence". This does not work in all set theory, as such an equivalence class would not be a set (because of Russell's paradox). The standard solution is to define a particular set with elements that will be called the natural number .

The following definition was first published by John von Neumann, although Levy attributes the idea to unpublished work of Zermelo in 1916. As this definition extends to infinite set as a definition of ordinal number, the sets considered below are sometimes called von Neumann ordinals.

The definition proceeds as follows:

Call , the empty set.
Define the successor of any set by .
By the axiom of infinity, there exist sets which contain 0 and are closed under the successor function. Such sets are said to be inductive. The intersection of all inductive sets is still an inductive set.
This intersection is the set of the natural numbers.

It follows that the natural numbers are defined iteratively as follows:

* ,

* etc.

It can be checked that the natural numbers satisfy the Peano axioms.

With this definition, given a natural number , the sentence "a set has elements" can be formally defined as "there exists a bijection from to ." This formalizes the operation of counting the elements of . Also, if and only if is a subset of . In other words, the set inclusion defines the usual total order on the natural numbers. This order is a well-order.

It follows from the definition that each natural number is equal to the set of all natural numbers less than it. This definition, can be extended to the von Neumann definition of ordinals for defining all , including the infinite ones: "each ordinal is the well-ordered set of all smaller ordinals."

If one finitism, the natural numbers may not form a set. Nevertheless, the natural numbers can still be individually defined as above, and they still satisfy the Peano axioms.

There are other set theoretical constructions. In particular, Ernst Zermelo provided a construction that is nowadays only of historical interest, and is sometimes referred to as . It consists in defining as the empty set, and .

With this definition each nonzero natural number is a singleton set. So, the property of the natural numbers to represent cardinalities is not directly accessible; only the ordinal property (being the th element of a sequence) is immediate. Unlike von Neumann's construction, the Zermelo ordinals do not extend to infinite ordinals.

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