Natural numbers in the context of Cardinal numeral

An abacus (pl. abaci or abacuses), also called a counting frame, is a hand-operated calculating tool which was used from ancient times, in the ancient Near East, Europe, China, and Russia, until largely replaced by handheld electronic calculators, during the 1980s, with some ongoing attempts to revive their use. An abacus consists of a two-dimensional array of slidable beads (or similar objects). In their earliest designs, the beads could be loose on a flat surface or sliding in grooves. Later the beads were made to slide on rods and built into a frame, allowing faster manipulation.

Each rod typically represents one digit of a multi-digit number laid out using a positional numeral system such as base ten (though some cultures used different numerical bases). Roman and East Asian abacuses use a system resembling bi-quinary coded decimal, with a top deck (containing one or two beads) representing fives and a bottom deck (containing four or five beads) representing ones. Natural numbers are normally used, but some allow simple fractional components (e.g. 1⁄2, 1⁄4, and 1⁄12 in Roman abacus), and a decimal point can be imagined for fixed-point arithmetic.

In mathematics, a rational number is a number that can be expressed as the quotient or fraction ⁠${\displaystyle {\tfrac {p}{q}}}$⁠ of two integers, a numerator p and a non-zero denominator q. For example, ⁠${\displaystyle {\tfrac {3}{7}}}$⁠ is a rational number, as is every integer (for example, ${\displaystyle -5={\tfrac {-5}{1}}}$). The set of all rational numbers is often referred to as "the rationals", and is closed under addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division by a nonzero rational number. It is a field under these operations and therefore also calledthe field of rationals or the field of rational numbers. It is usually denoted by boldface Q, or blackboard bold ⁠${\displaystyle \mathbb {Q} .}$⁠

A rational number is a real number. The real numbers that are rational are those whose decimal expansion either terminates after a finite number of digits (example: 3/4 = 0.75), or eventually begins to repeat the same finite sequence of digits over and over (example: 9/44 = 0.20454545...). This statement is true not only in base 10, but also in every other integer base, such as the binary and hexadecimal ones (see Repeating decimal § Extension to other bases).

Discrete mathematics is the study of mathematical structures that can be considered "discrete" (in a way analogous to discrete variables, having a one-to-one correspondence (bijection) with natural numbers), rather than "continuous" (analogously to continuous functions). Objects studied in discrete mathematics include integers, graphs, and statements in logic. By contrast, discrete mathematics excludes topics in "continuous mathematics" such as real numbers, calculus or Euclidean geometry. Discrete objects can often be enumerated by integers; more formally, discrete mathematics has been characterized as the branch of mathematics dealing with countable sets (finite sets or sets with the same cardinality as the natural numbers). However, there is no exact definition of the term "discrete mathematics".

The set of objects studied in discrete mathematics can be finite or infinite. The term finite mathematics is sometimes applied to parts of the field of discrete mathematics that deal with finite sets, particularly those areas relevant to business.

In mathematics, a binary relation associates some elements of one set called the domain with some elements of another set (possibly the same) called the codomain. Precisely, a binary relation over sets ${\displaystyle X}$ and ${\displaystyle Y}$ is a set of ordered pairs ${\displaystyle (x,y)}$, where ${\displaystyle x}$ is an element of ${\displaystyle X}$ and ${\displaystyle y}$ is an element of ${\displaystyle Y}$. It encodes the common concept of relation: an element ${\displaystyle x}$ is related to an element ${\displaystyle y}$, if and only if the pair ${\displaystyle (x,y)}$ belongs to the set of ordered pairs that defines the binary relation.

An example of a binary relation is the "divides" relation over the set of prime numbers ${\displaystyle \mathbb {P} }$ and the set of integers ${\displaystyle \mathbb {Z} }$, in which each prime ${\displaystyle p}$ is related to each integer ${\displaystyle z}$ that is a multiple of ${\displaystyle p}$, but not to an integer that is not a multiple of ${\displaystyle p}$. In this relation, for instance, the prime number ${\displaystyle 2}$ is related to numbers such as ${\displaystyle -4}$, ${\displaystyle 0}$, ${\displaystyle 6}$, ${\displaystyle 10}$, but not to ${\displaystyle 1}$ or ${\displaystyle 9}$, just as the prime number ${\displaystyle 3}$ is related to ${\displaystyle 0}$, ${\displaystyle 6}$, and ${\displaystyle 9}$, but not to ${\displaystyle 4}$ or ${\displaystyle 13}$.

In quantum mechanics, the principal quantum number (n) of an electron in an atom indicates which electron shell or energy level it is in. Its values are natural numbers (1, 2, 3, ...).

Hydrogen and Helium, at their lowest energies, have just one electron shell. Lithium through Neon (see periodic table) have two shells: two electrons in the first shell, and up to 8 in the second shell. Larger atoms have more shells.

In mathematical logic, the theory of infinite sets was first developed by Georg Cantor. Although this work has become a thoroughly standard fixture of classical set theory, it has been criticized in several areas by mathematicians and philosophers.

Cantor's theorem implies that there are sets having cardinality greater than the infinite cardinality of the set of natural numbers. Cantor's argument for this theorem is presented with one small change. This argument can be improved by using a definition he gave later. The resulting argument uses only five axioms of set theory.

In computability theory, the Church–Turing thesis (also known as computability thesis, the Turing–Church thesis, the Church–Turing conjecture, Church's thesis, Church's conjecture, and Turing's thesis) is a thesis about the nature of computable functions. It states that a function on the natural numbers can be calculated by an effective method if and only if it is computable by a Turing machine. The thesis is named after American mathematician Alonzo Church and the British mathematician Alan Turing. Before the precise definition of computable function, mathematicians often used the informal term effectively calculable to describe functions that are computable by paper-and-pencil methods. In the 1930s, several independent attempts were made to formalize the notion of computability:

• In 1933, Kurt Gödel, with Jacques Herbrand, formalized the definition of the class of general recursive functions: the smallest class of functions (with arbitrarily many arguments) that is closed under composition, recursion, and minimization, and includes zero, successor, and all projections.
• In 1936, Alonzo Church created a method for defining functions called the λ-calculus. Within λ-calculus, he defined an encoding of the natural numbers called the Church numerals. A function on the natural numbers is called λ-computable if the corresponding function on the Church numerals can be represented by a term of the λ-calculus.
• Also in 1936, before learning of Church's work, Alan Turing created a theoretical model for machines, now called Turing machines, that could carry out calculations from inputs by manipulating symbols on a tape. Given a suitable encoding of the natural numbers as sequences of symbols, a function on the natural numbers is called Turing computable if some Turing machine computes the corresponding function on encoded natural numbers.

Church, Kleene, and Turing proved that these three formally defined classes of computable functions coincide: a function is λ-computable if and only if it is Turing computable, and if and only if it is general recursive. This has led mathematicians and computer scientists to believe that the concept of computability is accurately characterized by these three equivalent processes. Other formal attempts to characterize computability have subsequently strengthened this belief (see below).

In computability theory, a set S of natural numbers is called computably enumerable (c.e.), recursively enumerable (r.e.), semidecidable, partially decidable, listable, provable or Turing-recognizable if:

• There is an algorithm such that the set of input numbers for which the algorithm halts is exactly S.

In mathematics, specifically general topology, compactness is a property that seeks to generalize the notion of a closed and bounded subset of Euclidean space. The idea is that every infinite sequence of points has limiting values. For example, the real line is not compact since the sequence of natural numbers has no real limiting value. The open interval (0,1) is not compact because it excludes the limiting values 0 and 1, whereas the closed interval [0,1] is compact. Similarly, the space of rational numbers ${\displaystyle \mathbb {Q} }$ is not compact, because every irrational number is the limit of the rational numbers that are lower than it. On the other hand, the extended real number line is compact, since it contains both infinities. There are many ways to make this heuristic notion precise. These ways usually agree in a metric space, but may not be equivalent in other topological spaces.

One such generalization is that a topological space is sequentially compact if every infinite sequence of points sampled from the space has an infinite subsequence that converges to some point of the space. The Bolzano–Weierstrass theorem states that a subset of Euclidean space is compact in this sequential sense if and only if it is closed and bounded. Thus, if one chooses an infinite number of points in the closed unit interval [0, 1], some of those points will get arbitrarily close to some real number in that space. For instance, some of the numbers in the sequence ⁠1/2⁠, ⁠4/5⁠, ⁠1/3⁠, ⁠5/6⁠, ⁠1/4⁠, ⁠6/7⁠, ... accumulate to 0 (while others accumulate to 1). Since neither 0 nor 1 are members of the open unit interval (0, 1), those same sets of points would not accumulate to any point of it, so the open unit interval is not compact. Although subsets (subspaces) of Euclidean space can be compact, the entire space itself is not compact, since it is not bounded. For example, considering ${\displaystyle \mathbb {R} ^{1}}$ (the real number line), the sequence of points 0,  1,  2,  3, ... has no subsequence that converges to any real number.

In probability, a discrete-time Markov chain (DTMC) is a sequence of random variables, known as a stochastic process, in which the value of the next variable depends only on the value of the current variable, and not any variables in the past. For instance, a machine may have two states, A and E. When it is in state A, there is a 40% chance of it moving to state E and a 60% chance of it remaining in state A. When it is in state E, there is a 70% chance of it moving to A and a 30% chance of it staying in E. The sequence of states of the machine is a Markov chain. If we denote the chain by ${\displaystyle X_{0},X_{1},X_{2},...}$ then ${\displaystyle X_{0}}$ is the state which the machine starts in and ${\displaystyle X_{10}}$ is the random variable describing its state after 10 transitions. The process continues forever, indexed by the natural numbers.

An example of a stochastic process which is not a Markov chain is the model of a machine which has states A and E and moves to A from either state with 50% chance if it has ever visited A before, and 20% chance if it has never visited A before (leaving a 50% or 80% chance that the machine moves to E). This is because the behavior of the machine depends on the whole history—if the machine is in E, it may have a 50% or 20% chance of moving to A, depending on its past values. Hence, it does not have the Markov property.

In functional analysis and related areas of mathematics, a sequence space is a vector space whose elements are infinite sequences of real or complex numbers. Equivalently, it is a function space whose elements are functions from the natural numbers to the field ⁠${\displaystyle \mathbb {K} }$⁠ of real or complex numbers. The set of all such functions is naturally identified with the set of all possible infinite sequences with elements in ⁠${\displaystyle \mathbb {K} }$⁠, and can be turned into a vector space under the operations of pointwise addition of functions and pointwise scalar multiplication. All sequence spaces are linear subspaces of this space. Sequence spaces are typically equipped with a norm, or at least the structure of a topological vector space.

The most important sequence spaces in analysis are the ⁠${\displaystyle \textstyle \ell ^{p}}$⁠ spaces, consisting of the ⁠${\displaystyle p}$⁠-power summable sequences, with the ⁠${\displaystyle p}$⁠-norm. These are special cases of ⁠${\displaystyle L^{p}}$⁠ spaces for the counting measure on the set of natural numbers. Other important classes of sequences like convergent sequences or null sequences form sequence spaces, respectively denoted ⁠${\displaystyle c}$⁠ and ⁠${\displaystyle c_{0}}$⁠, with the sup norm. Any sequence space can also be equipped with the topology of pointwise convergence, under which it becomes a special kind of Fréchet space called FK-space.

In computer science, a state space is a discrete space representing the set of all possible configurations of a system. It is a useful abstraction for reasoning about the behavior of a given system and is widely used in the fields of artificial intelligence and game theory.

For instance, the toy problem Vacuum World has a discrete finite state space in which there are a limited set of configurations that the vacuum and dirt can be in. A "counter" system, where states are the natural numbers starting at 1 and are incremented over time has an infinite discrete state space. The angular position of an undamped pendulum is a continuous (and therefore infinite) state space.

In set theory, the cardinality of the continuum is the cardinality or "size" of the set of real numbers ${\displaystyle \mathbb {R} }$, sometimes called the continuum. It is an infinite cardinal number and is denoted by ${\displaystyle {\mathbf {\mathfrak {c}}}}$ (lowercase Fraktur "c") or ${\displaystyle {\mathbf {|}}{\mathbf {\mathbb {R} }}{\mathbf {|}}.}$

The real numbers ${\displaystyle \mathbb {R} }$ are more numerous than the natural numbers ${\displaystyle \mathbb {N} }$. Moreover, ${\displaystyle \mathbb {R} }$ has the same number of elements as the power set of ${\displaystyle \mathbb {N} }$. Symbolically, if the cardinality of ${\displaystyle \mathbb {N} }$ is denoted as ${\displaystyle \aleph _{0}}$, the cardinality of the continuum is

Cantor's diagonal argument (among various similar names) is a mathematical proof that there are infinite sets which cannot be put into one-to-one correspondence with the infinite set of natural numbers – informally, that there are sets which in some sense contain more elements than there are positive integers. Such sets are now called uncountable sets, and the size of infinite sets is treated by the theory of cardinal numbers, which Cantor began.

Georg Cantor published this proof in 1891, but it was not his first proof of the uncountability of the real numbers, which appeared in 1874.However, it demonstrates a general technique that has since been used in a wide range of proofs, including the first of Gödel's incompleteness theorems and Turing's answer to the Entscheidungsproblem. Diagonalization arguments are often also the source of contradictions like Russell's paradox and Richard's paradox.

In computability theory, computational complexity theory and proof theory, a fast-growing hierarchy (also called an extended Grzegorczyk hierarchy, or a Schwichtenberg–Wainer hierarchy) is an ordinal-indexed family of rapidly increasing functions f_α: N → N (where N is the set of natural numbers {0, 1, ...}, and α ranges up to some large countable ordinal). A primary example is the Wainer hierarchy, or Löb–Wainer hierarchy, which is an extension to all α < ε₀. Such hierarchies provide a natural way to classify computable functions according to rate-of-growth and computational complexity.