ABSTRACT
When talking about numbers, people naturally think about mathematics. is phenomenon shows how much number computations since their elementary school years have left impressions in people’s memories. However, mathematics is only about quantities. And, cultures in both the West and the East almost all started to explore the environmental world from shapes. For example, the Book of Changes (Wilhalm and Baynes, 1967) of the East starts off on the basis of morphological structures of things by introducing the concept of yao written in “- -” and “—”. And the famous “river map” that has been in existence for over 6,000 to 7,000 years also applies morphological structures to represent the numbers 1, 2, … 10 and sum of 40; and the fraction 7/11 indicated in the figure exactly and implicitly shows the rate of the circumferences of circles (or the irrational number pi) of the transformation between curvature spaces and Euclidean spaces. At the time when Euclid’s elementary geometry was published, or a little ahead of the time of Socrates of ancient Greece, there was a school of learning named Pythagoras. It believed that all things were originated in (rational) numbers, that all the numbers within 10, meaning less than 10, possessed the mighty influential power, and that numbers represented the foremost principle and guidance that governed everything in the universe. So, to
them, without understanding (rational) numbers and their properties it would be impossible to know anything else, such as mutual relationships between things.
