Relation
A relation is a simple structure that can be placed on a pair or collection of sets to give a notion of "relatedness" to the elements of those sets.
Examples of relations include the relation of similarity on the set of triangles in a plane, the relation on the real numbers that indicates that a first number is exactly one larger than a second number, or the relation betweem the integers and the set that the two numbers are congruent modulo
.
Relations (also known as predicates) are one of the most important fundamental concepts of set theory. The most common kind of relations (including all of those mentioned in the preceding paragraph) are the binary relations, so we begin with them.
Binary Relations
A binary relation between a set
and a set
is formally defined as a subset of the Cartesian product
. If
and
, we say
is related to
under
if
. We write this as
, or, more commonly,
. If
, we say that
and
are not related under
.
For a more detailed treatment, see Binary relation.
-ary Relations
An -ary relation
over the sets
is a subset of the Cartesian product
. If
for
, we say
are related under
, and write
(unfortunately though, the other short hand breaks down here) if
. If
, we say
is an
-ary relation over
.
A very common example of an -ary relation is a linear constraint over a vector space
for some field
:
,
where
is an element of the vector space and
are scalars.