Editing Countable set (section)

==Introduction==
A ''[[Set (mathematics)|set]]'' is a collection of ''elements'', and may be described in many ways. One way is simply to list all of its elements; for example, the set consisting of the integers 3, 4, and 5 may be denoted <math>\{3, 4, 5\}</math>, called roster form.<ref>{{Cite web|date=2021-05-09|title=What Are Sets and Roster Form?|url=https://www.expii.com/t/what-are-sets-and-roster-form-4300| url-status=live|website=expii|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200918224155/https://www.expii.com/t/what-are-sets-and-roster-form-4300 |archive-date=2020-09-18 }}</ref> This is only effective for small sets, however; for larger sets, this would be time-consuming and error-prone. Instead of listing every single element, sometimes an ellipsis ("...") is used to represent many elements between the starting element and the end element in a set, if the writer believes that the reader can easily guess what ... represents; for example, <math>\{1, 2, 3, \dots, 100\}</math> presumably denotes the set of [[integer]]s from 1 to 100. Even in this case, however, it is still ''possible'' to list all the elements, because the number of elements in the set is finite. If we number the elements of the set 1, 2, and so on, up to <math>n</math>, this gives us the usual definition of "sets of size <math>n</math>".

[[File:Aplicación 2 inyectiva sobreyectiva02.svg|thumb|x100px|Bijective mapping from integer to even numbers]]
Some sets are ''infinite''; these sets have more than <math>n</math> elements where <math>n</math> is any integer that can be specified. (No matter how large the specified integer <math>n</math> is, such as <math>n=10^{1000}</math>, infinite sets have more than <math>n</math> elements.) For example, the set of natural numbers, denotable by <math>\{0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5,\dots\}</math>,{{efn|name=ZeroN|Since there is an obvious [[bijection]] between <math>\N</math> and <math>\N^*=\{1,2,3,\dots\}</math>, it makes no difference whether one considers 0 a natural number or not. In any case, this article follows [[ISO 31-11]] and the standard convention in [[mathematical logic]], which takes 0 as a natural number.}} has infinitely many elements, and we cannot use any natural number to give its size. It might seem natural to divide the sets into different classes: put all the sets containing one element together; all the sets containing two elements together; ...; finally, put together all infinite sets and consider them as having the same size. This view works well for countably infinite sets and was the prevailing assumption before Georg Cantor's work. For example, there are infinitely many odd integers, infinitely many even integers, and also infinitely many integers overall. We can consider all these sets to have the same "size" because we can arrange things such that, for every integer, there is a distinct even integer:
<math display="block">\ldots \, -\! 2\! \rightarrow \! - \! 4, \, -\! 1\! \rightarrow \! - \! 2, \, 0\! \rightarrow \! 0, \, 1\! \rightarrow \! 2, \, 2\! \rightarrow \! 4 \, \cdots</math>
or, more generally, <math>n \rightarrow 2n</math> (see picture). What we have done here is arrange the integers and the even integers into a ''one-to-one correspondence'' (or ''[[bijection]]''), which is a [[function (mathematics)|function]] that maps between two sets such that each element of each set corresponds to a single element in the other set. This mathematical notion of "size", cardinality, is that two sets are of the same size if and only if there is a bijection between them. We call all sets that are in one-to-one correspondence with the integers ''countably infinite'' and say they have cardinality <math>\aleph_0</math>.

[[Georg Cantor]] showed that not all infinite sets are countably infinite. For example, the real numbers cannot be put into one-to-one correspondence with the natural numbers (non-negative integers). The set of real numbers has a greater cardinality than the set of natural numbers and is said to be uncountable.