Meaning of transfinite number | Babel Free

Definitions

Any cardinal or ordinal number which is larger than any finite, i.e. natural number; often represented by the Hebrew letter aleph (ℵ) with a subscript 0, 1, etc.

Equivalents

Examples

“It will be recalled that Cantor called the first transfinite number ℵ₀. He called the second transfinite number—the one describing the set of all real numbers— C. It has not been proved whether C is the next transfinite number after ℵ₀ or whether another number exists between them.”

“Let R be a bicompact of dimensionality #92;operatorname#123;ind#125;(R)#92;le#92;alpha. If #92;alpha is an isolated transfinite number, than ^([sic]) at any point x#92;inR there exist arbitrarily small neighborhoods Vx with boundaries of dimensionality #92;operatorname#123;ind#125;#92;overline#123;Vx#125;#92;le#92;alpha-1.”

“After all, it was the ordinals that made precise definition of the transfinite cardinals possible. And until Cantor had introduced the order types of transfinite number classes, he could not define precisely any transfinite cardinal beyond the first power.”

“For example, does there exist a transfinite number that is strictly bigger than ℵ₀ and strictly smaller than ℵ₁? In this case an instance of this in between number is too big to be put into one-to-one correspondence with the set of natural numbers, and too small to be put into one-to-one correspondence with the set of real numbers.”

“Having demonstrated the existence of a one-to-one correspondence, we can conclude that the class of the squares of all the natural numbers has the same transfinite number as the class of all the natural numbers! This result is not what might have been anticipated, seeing that the second class is a proper subset of the first.”

CEFR level