WW #44: Things in Baskets

For Kharulian scholars, the definitive foundational text on mathematics was “Comfort with Numbers”, attributed to the legendary thinker Shuspum Iju. In this work, Shuspum starts with some basic assumptions about how numbers work, and uses them to prove various statements about arithmetic. But since this is pretty abstract, he uses the analogy of “things in baskets” to make things more tangible: a number like 7 is represented as a basket with seven things in it. Then various operations are phrased in terms of putting things into baskets and taking them out again.

The first basic assumption is:

Ghemzhim piúrum sálat anzaléplimir.

That is, you can always add one to a number; numbers go on forever.