ABSTRACT
In this section a brief, non-rigorous treatment of the system of whole and natural numbers is developed. Rather than follow one of the common approaches of obtaining these systems through Peano's Postulates (Giuseppe Peano, 1858-1932), an alternative development of cardinal numbers is pursued. The rationale for selecting this means to develop the whole and natural numbers is because it ties together, in an elementary manner, so many wonderful ideas that have been developed in the earlier chapters. In particular, it makes good use of properties of sets, functions, and one-to-one correspondences to arrive at the desired properties in very short order. In addition, the same ideas are employed later to develop transfinite cardinal numbers.
