Two sets and have the same cardinality if there exists a bijection , then we write:
Aleph Null
Aleph Null, denoted as is a symbol that replaces the string: so that we can write things like and it make sense.
The Countable Union of Countable Sets is Countable
As per title.
Let be a countable collection of countable sets. Denote . For each set , define an injection . Now define a function as follows: for each element , let be the first index such that . Define This ensures that is an injection from to , as the use of distinct powers of 2 for each set guarantees that no two elements from different 's are mapped to the same value in , this follows from the uniqueness of the prime factorization. If is finite, then it is trivially countable because finite sets are a special case of countable sets. If is infinite, then the image of , , is an infinite subset of , and any infinite subset of is countable (since it has a bijection to ). Therefore, is bijective to , and thus is countable.