Giuseppe Peano was an Italian mathematician and glottologist. The author of over 200 books and papers, he was a founder of mathematical logic and set theory, to which he contributed much notation. The standard axiomatization of the natural numbers is named the Peano axioms in his honor. As part of this effort, he made key contributions to the modern rigorous and systematic treatment of the method of mathematical induction. He spent most of his career teaching mathematics at the University of Turin. He also wrote an international auxiliary language, Latino sine flexione, which is a simplified version of Classical Latin. Most of his books and papers are in Latino sine flexione, while others are in Italian.

In mathematics, the natural numbers are the numbers 0, 1, 2, 3, etc., possibly excluding 0.[under discussion] Some define the natural numbers as the non-negative integers 0, 1, 2, 3, ..., while others define them as the positive integers 1, 2, 3, .... Some authors acknowledge both definitions whenever convenient. Some texts define the whole numbers as the natural numbers together with zero, excluding zero from the natural numbers, while in other writings, the whole numbers refer to all of the integers. The counting numbers refer to the natural numbers in common language, particularly in primary school education, and are similarly ambiguous although typically exclude zero.