Comment by falcor84

But that's the thing - each generation struggles with whether some new thing is a number. We're typically very inclusive, accepting imaginary numbers and even weirder things like surreal numbers, which we definitely can't count.

But as someone in this generation, I see a good argument for rejecting the big busy beaver numbers, which are provably outside of the realm of calculating with all the resources of our universe's runtime, from being fully accepted as numbers, any more than the first uninteresting number [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interesting_number_paradox