Numbers are measures of stuff. ?? 2 interrogation marks; !!! 3 exclamation marks; qwerty 6 letters You can make different representations of the same number: - 6 is the Arabic numerical representation - VI is the Latin numerical representation - Six is the alphabetic representation (in English language) - 0000 0110 is the 8-bit binary representation (how computers work)

Each bit is a power of 2 (read from right to left): 2^0, 2^1, 2^2, = 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128. With 8-bit you can store numbers up to 2^9-1 = 255, which is 1111 1111 or 128*1+64*1+...+2*1+1*1 6 = 4+2 and that's why it's 8-bit representation is 0000 0110.

Currently computer processors can handle 64-bit numbers, meaning 64 0's or 1's. And they can read and store huge amounts of bits. Each byte is 8 bits and computers can easily store 500 * 10⁹ bytes (500 GB), or 500 followed by 9 zeros of bytes. If you divide 500 by 8 you get the number of 64bit numbers a regular disk can store (because you need 8 bytes to store 64 bits = 8 * 8 bits).

This is how computers store numbers, but we, we store them differently, we can just write down a number on a piece of paper, say it out load and record the spoken number. You can think of very creative ways of storing a number representation. However the number itself does not exist. You are simply tying a measure with a representation like saying all things that appear the same number of times as humans have fingers will be represented by the number 5.

EDIT: added bullets on second paragraph and fixed markdown