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I want to know the cardinality of the set of prime numbers. Is it aleph not? The cardinality of natural numbers and all countably infinite sets? But, how can we make a mapping of the set of prime numbers with the set of natural numbers? Is there such a mapping to impose the same cardinality on the set of primes as that of natural numbers?

Bernard
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MHaris
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  • See this question – lulu Feb 27 '20 at 11:34
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    The mapping you're looking for is simply an enumeration of the prime numbers, for instance the one sending 1 to 2, 2 to 3, 3 to 5, and so on. – Ben Steffan Feb 27 '20 at 11:36
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    Welcome to Mathematics Stack Exchange. Did you mean aleph naught? – J. W. Tanner Feb 27 '20 at 12:09
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    I will point out that the function described by BenSteffan certainly exists. That it is difficult to compute is irrelevant. It doesn't bother us that we have a difficult time saying within a short amount of time what the four-billionth prime number is. It is obvious that there is a four-billionth prime number (and indeed an $n$'th prime number for any finite $n$) and that is all that we needed to convince ourselves of in regards to the validity of the existence of the described function. – JMoravitz Feb 27 '20 at 14:15

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Any infinite subset $A$ of the natural numbers $\Bbb N$ must have cardinality $\aleph_0$: being infinite implies there is an injection $\Bbb N\to A$, and since $A$ is a subset of $\Bbb N$, the identity map forms an injection $A\to \Bbb N$.

By the Cantor-Schröder-Bernstein theorem it follows that $|A|=|\Bbb N|=\aleph_0$.

In fact, you can make the above even stronger: any subset of the rational numbers, algebraic numbers or even computable numbers is countable, since each of those sets is countable.

Vsotvep
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