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Studies show, for example, that people are more likely to help a single person than they are to take action to support a statistically large but abstract number of victims.

Gross domestic product, the economy’s total output of goods and services, remains “an abstract number” to ordinary people, and the ruble’s exchange rate is less of a symbol than it used to be because most people can’t travel and there are fewer imported goods to buy, Kluge said.

Shortly before his death, he warned of a world where the individual “has lost his individuality and become a mere abstract number in the bureau of statistics.”

“Even if it means fewer programs, we want to see them done well, so I don’t think any of us felt like it was useful to just talk about an abstract number.”

Over the next millennium, algebra evolved from the study of the nature of solutions to polynomial equations to the study of abstract number systems.