Communities

Writing
Writing
Codidact Meta
Codidact Meta
The Great Outdoors
The Great Outdoors
Photography & Video
Photography & Video
Scientific Speculation
Scientific Speculation
Cooking
Cooking
Electrical Engineering
Electrical Engineering
Judaism
Judaism
Languages & Linguistics
Languages & Linguistics
Software Development
Software Development
Mathematics
Mathematics
Christianity
Christianity
Code Golf
Code Golf
Music
Music
Physics
Physics
Linux Systems
Linux Systems
Power Users
Power Users
Tabletop RPGs
Tabletop RPGs
Community Proposals
Community Proposals
tag:snake search within a tag
answers:0 unanswered questions
user:xxxx search by author id
score:0.5 posts with 0.5+ score
"snake oil" exact phrase
votes:4 posts with 4+ votes
created:<1w created < 1 week ago
post_type:xxxx type of post
Search help
Notifications
Mark all as read See all your notifications »
Q&A

Post History

66%
+2 −0
#1: Initial revision by user avatar celtschk‭ · 2021-08-19T15:38:53Z (over 2 years ago)
The terms “discrete” and “continuous” are not related to cardinality, but to topology. In particular, you can have a discrete topology on a space of arbitrary cardinality.

Note also that “discrete” is a property of a *set* in a topological space, while “continuous” is a property of *functions* between topological spaces. Therefore they are not even really opposites of each other.

A subset of a topological space is discrete if its subspace topology is the discrete topology. This is the case if all the points of the set are isolated, that is, for any point of the set you can find a neighbourhood that contains no other point of the set.

Now the natural opposite of this would be a set that has no isolated points at all. It might make sense to call such sets continuous, but I'm not aware of that being done.

The common use of “continuous” is in respect to functions. In intuitive terms, a function is continuous if the image of points that are close together still stay close together, that is, you can stay close in the image by staying sufficiently close in the domain. The formal definition is that a function is continuous if the preimages of open sets are open.

Conversely you can call a function discrete if its image is discrete. In that case, the only way for the image of a point to stay close is to not move at all. Note that a function can be continuous and discrete at the same time. One obvious example are constant functions. But also functions on a discrete domain are always continuous.