Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
There are two ways to define the "cardinality of a set": The cardinality of a set A is defined as its equivalence class under equinumerosity. A representative set is designated for each equivalence class. The most common choice is the initial ordinal in that class. This is usually taken as the definition of cardinal number in axiomatic set theory.
The notion of cardinality, as now understood, was formulated by Georg Cantor, the originator of set theory, in 1874–1884. Cardinality can be used to compare an aspect of finite sets. For example, the sets {1,2,3} and {4,5,6} are not equal, but have the same cardinality, namely three.
As a consequence, the cardinality of the real numbers, which is the same as that of the power set of the integers, is strictly larger than the cardinality of the integers; see Cardinality of the continuum for details. The theorem is named for Georg Cantor, who first stated and proved it at the end of the 19th century.
where A and B are two finite sets and |S| indicates the cardinality of a set S (which may be considered as the number of elements of the set, if the set is finite). The formula expresses the fact that the sum of the sizes of the two sets may be too large since some elements may be counted twice.
so that the second beth number is equal to , the cardinality of the continuum (the cardinality of the set of the real numbers), and the third beth number is the cardinality of the power set of the continuum.
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 ...
The HyperLogLog has three main operations: add to add a new element to the set, count to obtain the cardinality of the set and merge to obtain the union of two sets. Some derived operations can be computed using the inclusion–exclusion principle like the cardinality of the intersection or the cardinality of the difference between two HyperLogLogs combining the merge and count operations.
In set theory, the concept of cardinality is significantly developable without recourse to actually defining cardinal numbers as objects in the theory itself (this is in fact a viewpoint taken by Frege; Frege cardinals are basically equivalence classes on the entire universe of sets, by equinumerosity).