Singleton (mathematics) in the context of "Conjugation (group theory)"

In mathematics, a set is a collection of different things; the things are elements or members of the set and are typically mathematical objects: numbers, symbols, points in space, lines, other geometric shapes, variables, or other sets. A set may be finite or infinite. There is a unique set with no elements, called the empty set; a set with a single element is a singleton.

Sets are ubiquitous in modern mathematics. Indeed, set theory, more specifically Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory, has been the standard way to provide rigorous foundations for all branches of mathematics since the first half of the 20th century.

In mathematics, a tuple is a finite sequence or ordered list of numbers or, more generally, mathematical objects, which are called the elements of the tuple. An n-tuple is a tuple of n elements, where n is a non-negative integer. There is only one 0-tuple, called the empty tuple. A 1-tuple and a 2-tuple are commonly called a singleton and an ordered pair, respectively. The term "infinite tuple" is occasionally used for "infinite sequences".

Tuples are usually written by listing the elements within parentheses "( )" and separated by commas; for example, (2, 7, 4, 1, 7) denotes a 5-tuple. Other types of brackets are sometimes used, although they may have a different meaning.

In mathematics, a point x is called an isolated point of a subset S (in a topological space X) if x is an element of S and there exists a neighborhood of x that does not contain any other points of S. This is equivalent to saying that the singleton {x} is an open set in the topological space S (considered as a subspace of X). Another equivalent formulation is: an element x of S is an isolated point of S if and only if it is not a limit point of S.

If the space X is a metric space, for example a Euclidean space, then an element x of S is an isolated point of S if there exists an open ball around x that contains only finitely many elements of S.A point set that is made up only of isolated points is called a discrete set or discrete point set (see also discrete space).

In computer science, a binary tree is a tree data structure in which each node has at most two children, referred to as the left child and the right child. That is, it is a k-ary tree where k = 2. A recursive definition using set theory is that a binary tree is a triple (L, S, R), where L and R are binary trees or the empty set and S is a singleton (a single–element set) containing the root.

From a graph theory perspective, binary trees as defined here are arborescences. A binary tree may thus be also called a bifurcating arborescence, a term which appears in some early programming books before the modern computer science terminology prevailed. It is also possible to interpret a binary tree as an undirected, rather than directed graph, in which case a binary tree is an ordered, rooted tree. Some authors use rooted binary tree instead of binary tree to emphasize the fact that the tree is rooted, but as defined above, a binary tree is always rooted.