Abstract This research reveals the perspectives in the teaching of numerical thinking through a documentary review. The representation of physical elements such as functions, vectors and operators, and their subsequent interpretation through numerical thinking gives meaning to the physical quantities that such elements represent. A documentary sample integrated for 40 sources on numerical thinking such as articles published in indexed journals, postgraduate dissertations, and books is considered. A qualitative content analysis method is used. First, an encoding procedure is applied for tagging the extracted information from the source documents. Then, a split and merge procedure is considered in order to establish from the tags the dimensions and categories that allow determining the conceptual relationships that support the developmental perspectives of numerical thinking. The method reveals that the numerical thinking can be developed in the global context from four perspectives, namely, historical, theoretical, curricular, and social perspectives. From these results, an incorporation of the such perspectives can be institutionalized for promoting curricular, didactic and evaluative new proposals for numerical thinking teaching.