cantors-attic

Climb into Cantor’s Attic, where you will find infinities large and small. We aim to provide a comprehensive resource of information about all notions of mathematical infinity.

View the Project on GitHub neugierde/cantors-attic

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The upper attic
The middle attic
The lower attic
The parlour
The playroom
The library
The cellar

Sources
Cantor's Attic (original site)
Joel David Hamkins blog post about the Attic
Latest working snapshot at the wayback machine

Omega, $\omega$

The smallest infinite ordinal, often denoted $\omega$ (omega), has the order type of the natural numbers. As a von Neumann ordinal, $\omega$ is in fact equal to the set of natural numbers. Since $\omega$ is infinite, it is not equinumerous with any smaller ordinal, and so it is an initial ordinal, that is, a cardinal. When considered as a cardinal, the ordinal $\omega$ is denoted $\aleph_0$. So while these two notations are intensionally different—we use the term $\omega$ when using this number as an ordinal and $\aleph_0$ when using it as a cardinal—nevertheless in the contemporary treatment of cardinals in ZFC as initial ordinals, they are extensionally the same and refer to the same object.

Countable sets

A set is countable if it can be put into bijective correspondence with a subset of $\omega$. This includes all finite sets, and a set is countably infinite if it is countable and also infinite. Some famous examples of countable sets include:

The union of countably many countable sets remains countable, although in the general case this fact requires the axiom of choice.

A set is uncountable if it is not countable.