in sequential order starting at 1. It can be done using numbers alone (as in "counting to 10"), or by applying the count to objects (as in "counting the students in the class").

When applied to a collection of objects, counting determines the cardinality of the collection by establishing a one-to-one correspondence between the objects and the natural numbers. This involves consecutively "tagging" each object with a number while maintaining a running partition of the tagged objects from those not yet tagged. The numbers must be assigned