In a way, passing an array as argument always loses a dimension. The reason behind is that, for historical reasons, arrays cannot be directly copied, and thus what is really passed is a pointer. This is a common source of errors for novice programmers.
atomic number represents the protons in atom. As a example hydrogen has one proton and atomic number is 1.
The atomic number (number at the top) is the amount of protons and the amount of electrons. So if an element has an atomic number of 5, you know that it has 5 protons and 5 electrons. The atomic mass (number at the bottom) is the amount of protons and neutrons added together.