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In his controversial 1878 paper, Cantor explicitly defined the notion of "power" of sets and used it to prove that the set of all natural numbers and the set of all rational numbers are equinumerous (an example where a proper subset of an infinite set is equinumerous to the original set), and that the Cartesian product of even a ...
The continuum hypothesis says that =, i.e. is the smallest cardinal number bigger than , i.e. there is no set whose cardinality is strictly between that of the integers and that of the real numbers. The continuum hypothesis is independent of ZFC , a standard axiomatization of set theory; that is, it is impossible to prove the continuum ...
A bijective function, f: X → Y, from set X to set Y demonstrates that the sets have the same cardinality, in this case equal to the cardinal number 4. Aleph-null, the smallest infinite cardinal. In mathematics, a cardinal number, or cardinal for short, is what is commonly called the number of elements of a set.
Notably, ℵ ω is the first uncountable cardinal number that can be demonstrated within Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory not to be equal to the cardinality of the set of all real numbers 2 ℵ 0: For any natural number n ≥ 1, we can consistently assume that 2 ℵ 0 = ℵ n, and moreover it is possible to assume that 2 ℵ 0 is as least as large ...
Cardinal functions are widely used in topology as a tool for describing various topological properties. [2] [3] Below are some examples.(Note: some authors, arguing that "there are no finite cardinal numbers in general topology", [4] prefer to define the cardinal functions listed below so that they never taken on finite cardinal numbers as values; this requires modifying some of the ...
In mathematics, the rank, Prüfer rank, or torsion-free rank of an abelian group A is the cardinality of a maximal linearly independent subset. [1] The rank of A determines the size of the largest free abelian group contained in A. If A is torsion-free then it embeds into a vector space over the rational numbers of dimension rank A.
Examples of countably infinite sets are the natural numbers, the even numbers, the prime numbers, and also all the rational numbers, i.e., the fractions. These sets have in common the cardinal number |N| = (aleph-nought), a number greater than every natural number. Cardinal numbers can be defined as follows.
Let us call such numbers selfish. Other natural numbers are paired with subsets that do not contain them. For instance, in our example the number 1 is paired with the subset {4, 5}, which does not contain the number 1. Call these numbers non-selfish. Likewise, 3 and 4 are non-selfish. Using this idea, let us build a special set of natural numbers.