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Discrete mathematics is the study of mathematical structures that are fundamentally discrete rather than continuous.In contrast to real numbers that have the property of varying "smoothly", the objects studied in discrete mathematics – such as integers, graphs, and statements in logic [1] – do not vary smoothly in this way, but have distinct, separated values. [2]
Discrete mathematics is the study of mathematical structures that can be considered "discrete" (in a way analogous to discrete variables, having a bijection with the set of natural numbers) rather than "continuous" (analogously to continuous functions). Objects studied in discrete mathematics include integers, graphs, and statements in logic.
In mathematics, an element (or member) of a set is any one of the distinct objects that belong to that set. For example, given a set called A containing the first four positive integers (= {,,,}), one could say that "3 is an element of A", expressed notationally as .
Informally, a field is a set, along with two operations defined on that set: an addition operation written as a + b, and a multiplication operation written as a ⋅ b, both of which behave similarly as they behave for rational numbers and real numbers, including the existence of an additive inverse −a for all elements a, and of a multiplicative inverse b −1 for every nonzero element b.
This definition of disjoint sets can be extended to families of sets and to indexed families of sets. By definition, a collection of sets is called a family of sets (such as the power set, for example). In some sources this is a set of sets, while other sources allow it to be a multiset of sets, with some sets repeated.
A graph with three vertices and three edges. A graph (sometimes called an undirected graph to distinguish it from a directed graph, or a simple graph to distinguish it from a multigraph) [4] [5] is a pair G = (V, E), where V is a set whose elements are called vertices (singular: vertex), and E is a set of unordered pairs {,} of vertices, whose elements are called edges (sometimes links or lines).
In mathematics, an injective function (also known as injection, or one-to-one function [1]) is a function f that maps distinct elements of its domain to distinct elements of its codomain; that is, x 1 ≠ x 2 implies f(x 1) ≠ f(x 2) (equivalently by contraposition, f(x 1) = f(x 2) implies x 1 = x 2).
For example: "An even number is an integer which is divisible by 2." An extensional definition instead lists all objects where the term applies. For example: "An even number is any one of the following integers: 0, 2, 4, 6, 8..., -2, -4, -8..." In logic, the extension of a predicate is the set of all things for which the predicate is true. [49]