3 (number)

3 (three; /ˈθriː/) is a number, numeral, and glyph. It is the natural number following 2 and preceding 4.

Evolution of the glyph

Three is the largest number still written with as many lines as the number represents. (The Ancient Romans usually wrote 4 as IIII, but this was almost entirely replaced by the subtractive notation IV in the Middle Ages.) To this day 3 is written as three lines in Roman and Chinese numerals. This was the way the Brahmin Indians wrote it, and the Gupta made the three lines more curved. The Nagari started rotating the lines clockwise and ending each line with a slight downward stroke on the right. Eventually they made these strokes connect with the lines below, and evolved it to a character that looks very much like a modern 3 with an extra stroke at the bottom. It was the Western Ghubar Arabs who finally eliminated the extra stroke and created our modern 3. (The "extra" stroke, however, was very important to the Eastern Arabs, and they made it much larger, while rotating the strokes above to lie along a horizontal axis, and to this day Eastern Arabs write a 3 that looks like a mirrored 7 with ridges on its top line): ٣

Number

A number is a mathematical object used to count, measure, and label. The original examples are the natural numbers 1, 2, 3, and so forth. A notational symbol that represents a number is called a numeral. In addition to their use in counting and measuring, numerals are often used for labels (as with telephone numbers), for ordering (as with serial numbers), and for codes (as with ISBNs). In common usage, the term number may refer to a symbol, a word, or a mathematical abstraction.

In mathematics, the notion of number has been extended over the centuries to include 0, negative numbers, rational numbers such as and , real numbers such as and , complex numbers, which extend the real numbers by including , and sometimes additional objects. Calculations with numbers are done with arithmetical operations, the most familiar being addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and exponentiation. Their study or usage is called arithmetic. The same term may also refer to number theory, the study of the properties of the natural numbers.

The Three Little Pigs

The Three Little Pigs is a fable/fairy tale featuring anthropomorphic pigs who build three houses of different materials. A big bad wolf blows down the first two pigs' houses, made of straw and sticks respectively, but is unable to destroy the third pig's house, made of bricks. Printed versions date back to the 1840s, but the story itself is thought to be much older. The phrases used in the story, and the various morals drawn from it, have become embedded in Western culture.

It is a type 124 folktale in the Aarne–Thompson classification system.

Traditional versions

The Three Little Pigs was included in The Nursery Rhymes of England (London and New York, c.1886), by James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps. The story in its arguably best-known form appeared in English Fairy Tales by Joseph Jacobs, first published in 1890 and crediting Halliwell as his source. The story begins with the title characters being sent out into the world by their mother, to "seek out their fortune". The first little pig builds a house of straw, but a wolf blows it down and eats him. The second pig builds a house of furze sticks, which the wolf also blows down and eats him. Each exchange between wolf and pig features ringing proverbial phrases, namely:

Number Three

Number Three may refer to:

See also