"In communicating information about different sorts of things in the world, primitive man first learned to substitute crude pictures for speech to record seasonal occurrences for future use. ...As time went on the pictorial character of writing became less recognizable. ...The broad division between two kinds of writing... has its parallel in mathematics. The literature of mathematics begins with the pictorial or hieroglyphic language which we call geometry. ...At a much later date people stopped using nothing but pictures to record how numbers behave. They began to use letters, and compiled dictionaries in which you can find the meaning of the words used. Such dictionaries are called tables. ...Dictionary language, or, as mathematicians call it, "analysis," came later than hieroglyphic language, and grew out of it; but it has never supplanted the need for it completely."
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Lancelot Hogben, Mathematics for the Million (1936).
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Number
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