positive whole number, positive number which does not have a decimal or fraction
This article describes cardinal numbers in mathematics. For cardinals in linguistics, see
Names of numbers in English. In
mathematics, cardinal numbers, or cardinals for short, are a generalized kind of
number used to denote the size of a
set, known as its
cardinality. For
finite sets the cardinality is given by a
natural number, being simply the number of elements in the set. There are also
transfinite cardinal numbers to describe the sizes of infinite sets. On one hand, a
proper subset A of an
infinite set S may have the same cardinality as S. On the other hand, perhaps also counterintuitively, not all infinite sets have the same cardinality. There is a formal characterization that explains how some infinite sets have cardinalities that are strictly smaller than other infinite sets.
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