Chapter 1 -- The Birth of Numbers -- As children, we accepted without question most of the things we were taught; familiarity, later, made us take them for granted, and most of us have taken them for granted ever since. This is true of many mathematical concepts. Consequently, few of us realize the surprising simplicity of the ideas from which most of them sprang. The object of this book is to point out this simplicity, and by tracing the development of one idea to another, to remove some of the mystery that the average man so often associates with mathematics.