What is the Cardinality? What is the cardinality of the set A,B where
My answer was 4 for set A and 6 for set B. When i looked at the text book for answer it is not provided in the text book and now i'm wondering what the correct answer would be.
A = | { { a, b, c }, { b, c, a }, { c, b, a }, { b, a, c } } | 
B = | { { 1, 2, 3, { a, b, c } }, { 2, 3, 4 { b, c, d } }, { 3, 4, 5 { c, d, e } } } | 
Thanks

The cardinality of $A$ relies on two fundamental concepts about all sets: 


*

*Sets do not contain duplicates, so $\{x, x\}$ is always the same as $\{x\}$ 

*Two sets are equal if and only if they contain the same elements.  This means that $\{a,b,c\} = \{c,b,a\}$ and so on.


So while $A$ has been written to look like it contains 4 sets, all 4 of those sets contain the same elements and are actually all the same set.  And because sets don't contain duplicates.  $A$ should really be written as $\{\{a,b,c\}\}$, so its cardinality is 1.
The cardinality of $B$ is 3.  When calculating the cardinality of a set, you don't "look into" the members of the set and count nested sets.  So we can rewrite $B$ as such:


*

*$X = \{ 1, 2, 3, \{ a, b, c \} \}$

*$Y = \{ 2, 3, 4, \{ b, c, d \} \}$

*$Z = \{ 3, 4, 5, \{ c, d, e \} \}$

*$B = \{X,Y,Z\}$

