Operation (mathematics) - General Definition

General Definition

An operation ω is a function of the form ω : V → Y, where V ⊂ X₁ × … × X_k. The sets X_k are called the domains of the operation, the set Y is called the codomain of the operation, and the fixed non-negative integer k (the number of arguments) is called the type or arity of the operation. Thus a unary operation has arity one, and a binary operation has arity two. An operation of arity zero, called a nullary operation, is simply an element of the codomain Y. An operation of arity k is called a k-ary operation. Thus a k-ary operation is a (k+1)-ary relation that is functional on its first k domains.

The above describes what is usually called a finitary operation, referring to the finite number of arguments (the value k). There are obvious extensions where the arity is taken to be an infinite ordinal or cardinal, or even an arbitrary set indexing the arguments.

Often, use of the term operation implies that the domain of the function is a power of the codomain (i.e. the Cartesian product of one or more copies of the codomain), although this is by no means universal, as in the example of multiplying a vector by a scalar.