Operation (mathematics)

Common card · No. 226219

In mathematics, an operation is a function that takes as input a fixed number of elements of a set and returns an element of the same set. For example, addition on real numbers is an operation that accepts two real numbers and returns a real number. In general, the input values may be called "operands" or "arguments". The number of operands is the arity of the operation. The arity is usually one of 0 , 1 , 2 , … {\displaystyle 0,1,2,\ldots } . The most commonly studied operations are binary operations (i.e., operations of arity 2), such as addition and multiplication, and unary operations (i.e., operations of arity 1), such as additive inverse and multiplicative inverse. An operation of arity 0, or nullary operation, is a constant. The mixed product is an example of an operation of arity 3, also called ternary operation. The four classical operations are addition, subtraction, multiplication, and...

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