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There are also many ways to construct "the" real number system, and a popular approach involves starting from natural numbers, then defining rational numbers algebraically, and finally defining real numbers as equivalence classes of their Cauchy sequences or as Dedekind cuts, which are certain subsets of rational numbers. [19]
These are two examples in which both the subset and the whole set are infinite, and the subset has the same cardinality (the concept that corresponds to size, that is, the number of elements, of a finite set) as the whole; such cases can run counter to one's initial intuition. The set of rational numbers is a proper subset of the set of real ...
An axiomatic definition of the real numbers consists of defining them as the elements of a complete ordered field. [2] [3] [4] This means the following: The real numbers form a set, commonly denoted , containing two distinguished elements denoted 0 and 1, and on which are defined two binary operations and one binary relation; the operations are called addition and multiplication of real ...
Including 0, the set has a semiring structure (0 being the additive identity), known as the probability semiring; taking logarithms (with a choice of base giving a logarithmic unit) gives an isomorphism with the log semiring (with 0 corresponding to ), and its units (the finite numbers, excluding ) correspond to the positive real numbers.
Also, the real numbers form an ordered field, in which sums and products of positive numbers are also positive. Moreover, the ordering of the real numbers is total, and the real numbers have the least upper bound property: Every nonempty subset of that has an upper bound has a least upper bound that is also a real number.
Considering the natural numbers as a subset of the real numbers, and assuming that we know already that the real numbers are complete (again, either as an axiom or a theorem about the real number system), i.e., every bounded (from below) set has an infimum, then also every set of natural numbers has an infimum, say .
In topology and related areas of mathematics, a subset A of a topological space X is said to be dense in X if every point of X either belongs to A or else is arbitrarily "close" to a member of A — for instance, the rational numbers are a dense subset of the real numbers because every real number either is a rational number or has a rational number arbitrarily close to it (see Diophantine ...
On the real numbers , the usual less than relation < is a strict partial order. The same is also true of the usual greater than relation > on . By definition, every strict weak order is a strict partial order. The set of subsets of a given set (its power set) ordered by inclusion (see Fig. 1).