Wikipedia defines a Mathematical Constant as5:
‘A mathematical constant is a key number whose value is fixed by an unambiguous definition, often referred to by a symbol (e.g. an alphabet letter), or by mathematicians’ names to facilitate using it across multiple mathematical problems. Constants arise in many areas of mathematics, with constants such as e and π occurring in such diverse contexts as geometry, number theory, statistics and calculus.’
Below is their list of Mathematical Constants which includes my favourite Golden Ratio which was made famous by Fibonacci. Actually, I have included a link to the Wikipedia page because there are just so many.
The interesting thing is that all of them are positive except for two of them. The first of the non-positive is 0 and as already discussed, this is not really a number, it is neither positive nor negative. The second is the imaginary number √-1, which is not just a number but also a rotation of a certain magnitude.
So are there no negative Mathematical Constants? You could put a minus sign in front of any of them but that does not explain why they are all positive. They are positive because they emanate from the natural world where negative numbers do not exist.
I remember using punch cards to program in Assembler and never coming across actual negative numbers. I also remember studying memory dumps when trying to debug software. These dumps were in binary with a hexadecimal version to the right of the line printer paper. Line printer paper was 14 by 11 inches in size. It had holes down each side of the paper to facilitate it being fed through a printer. As suggested by the name, the printer printed one line at a time. I never found any negative numbers in the dumps, just 0s and 1s. The most significant bit, the leftmost bit, is used to distinguish between negative and positive with a 0 for positive and 1 for negative.
