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Transfinite numbers: Numbers that are greater than any natural number. Ordinal numbers: Finite and infinite numbers used to describe the order type of well-ordered sets. Cardinal numbers: Finite and infinite numbers used to describe the cardinalities of sets.
Sometimes, the whole numbers are the natural numbers plus zero. In other cases, the whole numbers refer to all of the integers, including negative integers. [3] The counting numbers are another term for the natural numbers, particularly in primary school education, and are ambiguous as well although typically start at 1. [4]
In mathematics, a set is countable if either it is finite or it can be made in one to one correspondence with the set of natural numbers. [a] Equivalently, a set is countable if there exists an injective function from it into the natural numbers; this means that each element in the set may be associated to a unique natural number, or that the elements of the set can be counted one at a time ...
The main kinds of numbers employed in arithmetic are natural numbers, whole numbers, integers, rational numbers, and real numbers. [12] The natural numbers are whole numbers that start from 1 and go to infinity. They exclude 0 and negative numbers.
In Zermelo–Fraenkel (ZF) set theory, the natural numbers are defined recursively by letting 0 = {} be the empty set and n + 1 (the successor function) = n ∪ {n} for each n. In this way n = {0, 1, …, n − 1} for each natural number n. This definition has the property that n is a set with n elements.
The whole numbers were synonymous with the integers up until the early 1950s. [23] [24] [25] In the late 1950s, as part of the New Math movement, [26] American elementary school teachers began teaching that whole numbers referred to the natural numbers, excluding negative numbers, while integer included the negative numbers.
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 .
For all natural numbers x and y, if x = y, then y = x. That is, equality is symmetric. For all natural numbers x, y and z, if x = y and y = z, then x = z. That is, equality is transitive. For all a and b, if b is a natural number and a = b, then a is also a natural number. That is, the natural numbers are closed under equality.