To ask what your answer would be- How many numbers are there between 1 and 5?

[NorwegianMoon]

to do with my maths education at school. I was told three different answers by three math teachers at school.

Im wondering what answers you will suggest?

2 and 3 are considered prime numbers though...

I though it was 0 that "isn't a number" (or summin like that)

X-post, sorry.

0 is a number.

Inifnity is the only thing I can think of that can be treated as a number but probably isn't one.

it was my school, not my childrens.

I will never send my los there, I was on page 48 for 2 years with a different supply teacher each day they never spoke english. My maths teacher walked out of class and was never replaced. My art teacher drank in class and my geography teacher was later convicted of having indecent photos of little children on his PC. We had another teacher who was later found to be a paedophile. oh and an openly racist head teacher.

gotta love B*

I think that people may be misremembering the fact that 1 is not a prime number as it not being a number.

If the question was "how many primes are there in the numbers 1-5" the answer would be 3 - 2,3 and 5.

Am answering before reading any other answers but I would say an infinite amount. Numbers aren't restricted to whole numbers.

3 integers between 1 and 5 exclusive and 5 integers between 1 and 5 inclusive.

I can just about see where 4 might come from, in that if you are on thing number one (e.g. 1st day of the month), you have to go through 4 days to get to thing number five.

x x x x x
1 2 3 4 5

If you are on stepping stone number one, you have to hope four times (or onto four numbers) to get to stepping stone number five.

...But obviously 3, or 5, probably makes more sense.

I get really confused when age brackets go like this on forms:

Under 25
26-35
36-45

etc - 25 year olds aren't in any of those groups AFAIC.

but 1 isn't a prime number. No idea what a 'primary' number is but I woudl assume that is what it means.

between 1 and 5 I would say 3.
If I say give me a number from 1 to 5 then you would have a choice of 5 number, but between would give you a choice of 3.

ElfPants - yes if you are using between to mean subtraction then the answer is 4.

is the problem that some people are interepreting this as what is the differnce bewteen the 2 numbers, ie subtraction, answer therefore 4

and some are thinking how many whole numbers in between , in which case there are 3

how did this come up, what context. If it was an actual question asked of pupils its a rubbish one!

LOL at own typos!

I cant remember how it came up exactly. I think it was something to do with me asking for extra help from the basics, them asking how basic and then suggested that to me, I went on to ask others and got different answers each time.

I dont think the infinite numbers thing was relevent, we didnt do those in my maths lessons :(

As ashamedandconfused rightly points out there's often some ambiguity in the word 'between'. We often have to clarify whether it's 'inclusive' e.g. Competition entries will be accepted between the 3rd September and the 25th November inclusive.

I don't think needing to clarify the question makes you bad at maths.

Inclusive/exclusive is the key, as is specifying that you are looking only at integers (whole numbers).

I would have answered 3.

The numbers 2,3,and 4 are between 1 and 5.

I fucking hate maths!

I will be thinking about this all day now

sorry karma

I dont agree with maths anyway, who says x is really x, it might be z and what is z...its all relative to how we have named it. one day something will pop up and we will find all we knew was crap.

how can 0 be a number?

you can have 1 of something, you can have half of something... etc.. but you cant have 0 of something,...

Zero is defiantly a number. It may not be a natural number depending on your definition, but it is certainly a number.

I am actually quite scared that my 13 year old knows more than me. I do actually have a maths GCSE (albeit only a C). Fuck knows how that happened.

If they want whole numbers, then 3. There are 3 whole numbers between 1 and 5. When you count between, you don't count the items on the outside.

But on a very basic level, the answer is an infinite number.

I said 4 then realised it's 3 before clicking on the thread.

If you had 5 children you'd say you had 3 children between your 1st and last wouldn't you?

NorweiganMoon - Ah, but x IS only x because we say it is - maths is just about studying considering sets of consistent axioms (rules).

For instance, in our usual arithmetic xy = yx. There are other systems where that isn't true. In matrix multiplication for instance xy!=yx.

Any connection between mathematics and anything you experience in day to day life is purely co-incidental.