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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.
In mathematics, cardinality describes a relationship between sets which compares their relative size. [1] For example, the sets A = { 1 , 2 , 3 } {\displaystyle A=\{1,2,3\}} and B = { 2 , 4 , 6 } {\displaystyle B=\{2,4,6\}} are the same size as they each contain 3 elements .
For example, take a car and an owner of the car. The car can only be owned by one owner at a time or not owned at all, and an owner could own zero, one, or multiple cars. One owner could have many cars, one-to-many. In a relational database, a one-to-many relationship exists when one record is related to many records of another table. A one-to ...
They were introduced by the mathematician Georg Cantor [1] and are named after the symbol he used to denote them, the Hebrew letter aleph (ℵ). [2] [a] The cardinality of the natural numbers is ℵ 0 (read aleph-nought, aleph-zero, or aleph-null), the next larger cardinality of a well-ordered set is aleph-one ℵ 1, then ℵ 2 and so on.
Within data modelling, cardinality is the numerical relationship between rows of one table and rows in another. Common cardinalities include one-to-one , one-to-many , and many-to-many . Cardinality can be used to define data models as well as analyze entities within datasets.
One way to do this is to say that two sets "have the same number of elements", if and only if all the elements of one set can be paired with the elements of the other, in such a way that each element is paired with exactly one element. Accordingly, one can define two sets to "have the same number of elements"—if there is a bijection between them.
A bijection, bijective function, or one-to-one correspondence between two mathematical sets is a function such that each element of the second set (the codomain) is the image of exactly one element of the first set (the domain).
The most frequently used cardinal function is the function that assigns to a set A its cardinality, denoted by |A|. Aleph numbers and beth numbers can both be seen as cardinal functions defined on ordinal numbers. Cardinal arithmetic operations are examples of functions from cardinal numbers (or pairs of them) to cardinal numbers.