"If the Greeks had had a mind to reduce mathematics to one field... their only choice would have been to reduce arithmetic to geometry... it is hardly surprising that for nearly two millennia geometry took pride of place in mathematics. And it would have been obvious to any mathematician that a geometrical problem could not be stated or solved in the language of numbers, since the geometrical universe had more structure than the numerical universe. If one desired to translate geometrical problems into the language of numbers, one would have to invent (or discover) more numbers."
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Tim Maudlin, New Foundations for Physical Geometry: The Theory of Linear Structures (2014) p. 12.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Number
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