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

Successor Ordinal

A successor ordinal, by definition, is an ordinal $\alpha$ that is equal to $\beta + 1$ for some ordinal $\beta$.

The successor function, denoted as $\beta+1$, $\operatorname{suc} \beta$, or $\beta ^+$ is defined on the ordinals as $\beta \cup \{ \beta \}$

Properties of the successor

There are no ordinals between $\beta$ and $\beta + 1$.

The union $\bigcup \beta$ can be thought of as an inverse successor function, because $\bigcup ( \beta + 1 ) = \beta$. All limit ordinals are equal to their union.