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Transactions of the American Mathematical Society
Transactions of the American Mathematical Society
ISSN 1088-6850(e) ISSN 0002-9947(p)

     

Numerosities of point sets over the real line

Author(s): Mauro Di Nasso; Marco Forti
Journal: Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 362 (2010), 5355-5371.
MSC (2010): Primary 03E65, 03E05; Secondary 03E35, 03A05, 03C20
Posted: May 19, 2010
MathSciNet review: 2657683
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Abstract | References | Similar articles | Additional information

Abstract: We consider the possibility of a notion of size for point sets, i.e. subsets of the Euclidean spaces $ \mathbb{E}_{d}( \mathbb{R})$ of all $ d$-tuples of real numbers, that satisfies the fifth common notion of Euclid's Elements: ``the whole is larger than the part''. Clearly, such a notion of ``numerosity'' can agree with cardinality only for finite sets. We show that ``numerosities'' can be assigned to every point set in such a way that the natural Cantorian definitions of the arithmetical operations provide a very good algebraic structure. Contrasting with cardinal arithmetic, numerosities can be taken as (nonnegative) elements of a discretely ordered ring, where sums and products correspond to disjoint unions and Cartesian products, respectively. Actually, our numerosities form suitable semirings of hyperintegers of nonstandard Analysis. Under mild set-theoretic hypotheses (e.g. $ \textbf{cov}(\mathcal{B})=\mathfrak{c}< \aleph_{\omega}$), we can also have the natural ordering property that, given any two countable point sets, one is equinumerous to a subset of the other. Extending this property to uncountable sets seems to be a difficult problem.


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Additional Information:

Mauro Di Nasso
Affiliation: Dipartimento di Matematica ``L. Tonelli'', Università di Pisa, Pisa, Italy
Email: dinasso@dm.unipi.it

Marco Forti
Affiliation: Dipartimento di Matematica Applicata ``U. Dini'', Università di Pisa, Pisa, Italy
Email: forti@dma.unipi.it

DOI: 10.1090/S0002-9947-2010-04919-0
PII: S 0002-9947(2010)04919-0
Received by editor(s): July 25, 2008
Posted: May 19, 2010
Copyright of article: Copyright 2010, American Mathematical Society
The copyright for this article reverts to public domain after 28 years from publication.




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