Cartesian Product
The definition of multiplication as repeated addition provides a way to arrive at a set-theoretic interpretation of multiplication of cardinal numbers. In the expression
if the n copies of a are to be combined in disjoint union then clearly they must be made disjoint; an obvious way to do this is to use either a or n as the indexing set for the other. Then, the members of are exactly those of the Cartesian product . The properties of the multiplicative operation as applying to natural numbers then follow trivially from the corresponding properties of the Cartesian product.
Read more about this topic: Times, Multiplication With Set Theory
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