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I'm a mathematician too, and it doesn't make sense to me. It seems somewhat arbitrary depending on the application, i.e. I think it is a type problem. We use an

• samatman 4y ago
  The question is whether 0 is a valid ordinal. If it is, why skip it? If you allow 0 as a valid ordinal, it unifies ordination and measure. That's the best reason to do so. There. Djikstra as haiku.
• JadeNB 4y ago
  > I'm a mathematician too, and it doesn't make sense to me. Just to be clear, I wasn't making some sort of bizarre appeal to authority; whether something makes sense is a matter of taste, not of mathematics, and can't be proven or dis-. I meant only to respond to: > In maths they always talk about the first element in a vector, not the zeroth. It is a bad argument to point to mathematics for using zero based indices. I don't know for sure which convention is more common, though I suspect you're right that it's the 1-based convention, but I do know that it's false that 'they'—meaning, among others, we!—always talk about the first element/component in a vector. I probably will do that in a first Linear Algebra class, because the textbook often does and I don't want to introduce unnecessary confusion; but usually in my own work, and sometimes when I teach upper-level math classes, I use 0-based indexing when it's necessary to choose.