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Numerosity (mathematics)
The numerosity of an infinite set, as ininitally introduced by the Italian mathematician Vieri Benci and later on extended with the help of Mauro Di Nasso and Marco Forti, is a concept that develops Cantor’s notion of cardinality. While Cantor’s classical cardinality classifies sets based on the existence of a one-to-one correspondence with other sets (defining, for example, \aleph_0 for countable sets, \aleph_1 and so on for larger infinities), the idea of numerosity aims to provide an alternative viewpoint, linking to the common Euclidean notion that "the whole is greater than the part". All of this naturally leads to the hypernatural numbers. In short, Benci and his collaborators propose associating with an infinite set a numerical value that more directly reflects its “number of elements”, without resorting solely to one-to-one correspondences.Benci, V. (1995). "I Numeri e gli Insiemi Etichettati", Laterza, Bari, Italia. Conferenze del seminario di matematica dell' U ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Vieri Benci
Vieri Benci (born May 9, 1949) is an Italian mathematician who worked at the University of Pisa. He has contributed to various fields of mathematics such as the partial differential equations (PDEs), mathematical physics, Hamiltonian dynamics, soliton theory, the geometry of general relativity, nonstandard analysis and the foundations of mathematics. In the latter two disciplines he introduced, in collaboration with M. Di Nasso and M. Forti, a theory of numerosity that refines the cantorian theory of cardinality; he has also worked on applications of nonstandard analysis to probability. Education and career After winning the admission competition to the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa in 1968, ranking first, he graduated in mathematics in 1972 under the guidance of Guido Stampacchia at the University of Pisa, at the same time obtaining the diploma as a normalist. He continued his studies at the University of Paris VI (1972-74) and at Courant Institute of Mathematical Scienc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cardinality
The thumb is the first digit of the hand, next to the index finger. When a person is standing in the medical anatomical position (where the palm is facing to the front), the thumb is the outermost digit. The Medical Latin English noun for thumb is ''pollex'' (compare ''hallux'' for big toe), and the corresponding adjective for thumb is ''pollical''. Definition Thumb and fingers The English word ''finger'' has two senses, even in the context of appendages of a single typical human hand: 1) Any of the five terminal members of the hand. 2) Any of the four terminal members of the hand, other than the thumb. Linguistically, it appears that the original sense was the first of these two: (also rendered as ) was, in the inferred Proto-Indo-European language, a suffixed form of (or ), which has given rise to many Indo-European-family words (tens of them defined in English dictionaries) that involve, or stem from, concepts of fiveness. The thumb shares the following with each of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
One-to-one Correspondence
In mathematics, a bijection, bijective function, or one-to-one correspondence is a function between two sets such that each element of the second set (the codomain) is the image of exactly one element of the first set (the domain). Equivalently, a bijection is a relation between two sets such that each element of either set is paired with exactly one element of the other set. A function is bijective if it is invertible; that is, a function f:X\to Y is bijective if and only if there is a function g:Y\to X, the ''inverse'' of , such that each of the two ways for composing the two functions produces an identity function: g(f(x)) = x for each x in X and f(g(y)) = y for each y in Y. For example, the ''multiplication by two'' defines a bijection from the integers to the even numbers, which has the ''division by two'' as its inverse function. A function is bijective if and only if it is both injective (or ''one-to-one'')—meaning that each element in the codomain is mapped f ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Real Number
In mathematics, a real number is a number that can be used to measure a continuous one- dimensional quantity such as a duration or temperature. Here, ''continuous'' means that pairs of values can have arbitrarily small differences. Every real number can be almost uniquely represented by an infinite decimal expansion. The real numbers are fundamental in calculus (and in many other branches of mathematics), in particular by their role in the classical definitions of limits, continuity and derivatives. The set of real numbers, sometimes called "the reals", is traditionally denoted by a bold , often using blackboard bold, . The adjective ''real'', used in the 17th century by René Descartes, distinguishes real numbers from imaginary numbers such as the square roots of . The real numbers include the rational numbers, such as the integer and the fraction . The rest of the real numbers are called irrational numbers. Some irrational numbers (as well as all the rationals) a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nonstandard Analysis
The history of calculus is fraught with philosophical debates about the meaning and logical validity of fluxions or infinitesimal numbers. The standard way to resolve these debates is to define the operations of calculus using (ε, δ)-definition of limit, limits rather than infinitesimals. Nonstandard analysis instead reformulates the calculus using a logically rigorous notion of infinitesimal numbers. Nonstandard analysis originated in the early 1960s by the mathematician Abraham Robinson. He wrote: ... the idea of infinitely small or ''infinitesimal'' quantities seems to appeal naturally to our intuition. At any rate, the use of infinitesimals was widespread during the formative stages of the Differential and Integral Calculus. As for the objection ... that the distance between two distinct real numbers cannot be infinitely small, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz argued that the theory of infinitesimals implies the introduction of ideal numbers which might be infinitely small or inf ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cardinality
The thumb is the first digit of the hand, next to the index finger. When a person is standing in the medical anatomical position (where the palm is facing to the front), the thumb is the outermost digit. The Medical Latin English noun for thumb is ''pollex'' (compare ''hallux'' for big toe), and the corresponding adjective for thumb is ''pollical''. Definition Thumb and fingers The English word ''finger'' has two senses, even in the context of appendages of a single typical human hand: 1) Any of the five terminal members of the hand. 2) Any of the four terminal members of the hand, other than the thumb. Linguistically, it appears that the original sense was the first of these two: (also rendered as ) was, in the inferred Proto-Indo-European language, a suffixed form of (or ), which has given rise to many Indo-European-family words (tens of them defined in English dictionaries) that involve, or stem from, concepts of fiveness. The thumb shares the following with each of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cardinal Number
In mathematics, a cardinal number, or cardinal for short, is what is commonly called the number of elements of a set. In the case of a finite set, its cardinal number, or cardinality is therefore a natural number. For dealing with the case of infinite sets, the infinite cardinal numbers have been introduced, which are often denoted with the Hebrew letter \aleph (aleph) marked with subscript indicating their rank among the infinite cardinals. Cardinality is defined in terms of bijective functions. Two sets have the same cardinality if, and only if, there is a one-to-one correspondence (bijection) between the elements of the two sets. In the case of finite sets, this agrees with the intuitive notion of number of elements. In the case of infinite sets, the behavior is more complex. A fundamental theorem due to Georg Cantor shows that it is possible for two infinite sets to have different cardinalities, and in particular the cardinality of the set of real numbers is gre ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Natural Density
In number theory, natural density, also referred to as asymptotic density or arithmetic density, is one method to measure how "large" a subset of the set of natural numbers is. It relies chiefly on the probability of encountering members of the desired subset when combing through the interval as grows large. For example, it may seem intuitively that there are more positive integers than perfect squares, because every perfect square is already positive and yet many other positive integers exist besides. However, the set of positive integers is not in fact larger than the set of perfect squares: both sets are infinite and countable and can therefore be put in one-to-one correspondence. Nevertheless if one goes through the natural numbers, the squares become increasingly scarce. The notion of natural density makes this intuition precise for many, but not all, subsets of the naturals (see Schnirelmann density, which is similar to natural density but defined for all subsets of \math ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hyperreal Number
In mathematics, hyperreal numbers are an extension of the real numbers to include certain classes of infinite and infinitesimal numbers. A hyperreal number x is said to be finite if, and only if, , x, [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ordinal Number
In set theory, an ordinal number, or ordinal, is a generalization of ordinal numerals (first, second, th, etc.) aimed to extend enumeration to infinite sets. A finite set can be enumerated by successively labeling each element with the least natural number that has not been previously used. To extend this process to various infinite sets, ordinal numbers are defined more generally using linearly ordered greek letter variables that include the natural numbers and have the property that every set of ordinals has a least or "smallest" element (this is needed for giving a meaning to "the least unused element"). This more general definition allows us to define an ordinal number \omega (omega) to be the least element that is greater than every natural number, along with ordinal numbers , , etc., which are even greater than . A linear order such that every non-empty subset has a least element is called a well-order. The axiom of choice implies that every set can be well-orde ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cantor's Theorem
In mathematical set theory, Cantor's theorem is a fundamental result which states that, for any Set (mathematics), set A, the set of all subsets of A, known as the power set of A, has a strictly greater cardinality than A itself. For finite sets, Cantor's theorem can be seen to be true by simple enumeration of the number of subsets. Counting the empty set as a subset, a set with n elements has a total of 2^n subsets, and the theorem holds because 2^n > n for all non-negative integers. Much more significant is Cantor's discovery of an argument that is applicable to any set, and shows that the theorem holds for infinite set, infinite sets also. 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. Cantor's theorem ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Surreal Number
In mathematics, the surreal number system is a total order, totally ordered proper class containing not only the real numbers but also Infinity, infinite and infinitesimal, infinitesimal numbers, respectively larger or smaller in absolute value than any positive real number. Research on the Go endgame by John Horton Conway led to the original definition and construction of surreal numbers. Conway's construction was introduced in Donald Knuth's 1974 book ''Surreal Numbers: How Two Ex-Students Turned On to Pure Mathematics and Found Total Happiness''. The surreals share many properties with the reals, including the usual arithmetic operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division); as such, they form an ordered field. If formulated in von Neumann–Bernays–Gödel set theory, the surreal numbers are a universal ordered field in the sense that all other ordered fields, such as the rationals, the reals, the rational functions, the Levi-Civita field, the superreal numbe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
