Hi Arnav, good question! What the natural numbers have in common is that they represent a quantity of whole items, say students.

0 alone represents no students, so it does not qualify to be called a natural number.  All other whole, positive numbers qualify.

When you write "10 students" you don't actually have one special kind of student that is called a ten-student and zero one-students. If your ten students got instantly merged into this super-student, then you could make the claim that 10 students meant there were 0 students. But that's not happening.

We just write this way as a kind of shorthand. It is very convenient to write the the number as 13 rather than \\\\\\\\\\\\\ . So the 0 is given a new meaning when it is used to write multi digit numbers.Giving the symbol 0 these different meanings is strange and wonderful!