How many? - A great example of what I was talking about when I wrote about the strangeness of possibilities spaces in software development and how we forget how strange and non-obvious things are. It happens all the time.
Brian Keating interviews mathematician Eugenia Cheng, and she tells the story (12:30) that it took humans a really long time to get used to the number zero. They got used to natural numbers like 1 2 3 etc relatively quickly, but the idea that no things was an actual number didn't occur to people for literally ages. That seems very odd now. Software development is full of these types of realisations.
"Once you realise that zero is everywhere...I hope everyone can see that in their house now there are zero elephants, unless of course, you have an elephant in your house".
Believe it or not people were very suspicious of the number zero. Some still are! In mathematics it's often about accepting some things are rather weird AND going ahead as well.
Mathematics is fucking hilarious sometimes, but also one of the most useful tools we have. #