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The abstraction of cardinality as a number is evident by 3000 BCE, in Sumerian mathematics and the manipulation of numbers without reference to a specific group of things or events. [ 6 ] From the 6th century BCE, the writings of Greek philosophers show hints of the cardinality of infinite sets.
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.
is a finite set with five elements. The number of elements of a finite set is a natural number (possibly zero) and is called the cardinality (or the cardinal number) of the set. A set that is not a finite set is called an infinite set. For example, the set of all positive integers is infinite:
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 cardinality of any infinite ordinal number is an aleph number. Every aleph is the cardinality of some ordinal. The least of these is its initial ordinal. Any set whose cardinality is an aleph is equinumerous with an ordinal and is thus well-orderable. Each finite set is well-orderable, but does not have an aleph as its cardinality.
The goal of a cardinal assignment is to assign to every set A a specific, unique set that is only dependent on the cardinality of A. This is in accordance with Cantor 's original vision of cardinals: to take a set and abstract its elements into canonical "units" and collect these units into another set, such that the only thing special about ...
The category < of sets of cardinality less than and all functions between them is closed under colimits of cardinality less than . κ {\displaystyle \kappa } is a regular ordinal (see below) Crudely speaking, this means that a regular cardinal is one that cannot be broken down into a small number of smaller parts.
The cardinality of the (α + 1)-th number class is the cardinality immediately following that of the α-th number class. [16] For a limit ordinal α, the α-th number class is the union of the β-th number classes for β < α. [17] Its cardinality is the limit of the cardinalities of these number classes.