Definition:Natural Numbers/Historical Note

Historical Note on Natural Numbers
The natural numbers were the first numbers to be considered.

Their earliest use was in the sense of ordinal numbers, when they were used for counting.

The origin of the name natural numbers (considered by some authors to be a misnomer) originates with the Ancient Greeks, for whom the only numbers were the strictly positive integers $1, 2, 3, \ldots$

It is customary at this stage to quote the famous of, translated from the German in various styles, for example:
 * God created the natural numbers, and all the rest is the work of man.