What is the significance of the number one?
#What is the significance of the number one?
subtle kiln
There are many ways in which 1 is significant.
One of the most interesting ways is that if you think of all positive real numbers as either proper or improper fractions (for example, 2/3 and 5/2, respectively), the number 1 is the demarcation.
Think of it this way: all the positive real numbers consist of numbers x between 0 and 1, and their reciprocals, 1/x. So 1 is the magical "half way point" in exponentiation.
1 has great significance both in probability and statistics.
A probability of 1 amounts to virtual certainty or better...
this is not necessarily the same as absolute certainty, but absolute certainty also has a probability of 1.
A corrleation of 1 means that two quantities x and y are perfectly correlated: therefore, the more x you have, the more y you get, and vice-versa, without fail.