arity Math.
(ˈærɪtɪ)
[f. -ary1 (in binary, ternary adjs., etc.) + -ity.]
The number of elements by virtue of which something is unary, binary, etc.
| 1968 Fundamenta Mathematicae LXII. 191 E. Marczewski introduced..the order of enlargeability and the arity or the order of reducibility of abstract algebras. 1973 Colloquium Mathematicum XXVII. 175 (heading) On the arity of idempotent reduct of abelian groups. 1974 Encycl. Brit. Macropædia I. 554/2 With each member ω of Ω an integer n(ω) is associated, to indicate the arity of the resulting operation. 1979 Proc. IEEE Computer Soc. Conf. Pattern Recognition & Image Processing 202/1 Any heuristic for problem solving..is based on the recognition of a unary relation (subset) or a relation of higher arity on the set of states of the problem. 1983 Jrnl. Symbolic Logic XLVIII. 1231 (heading) Point-arity—the new cardinality index for ideals. |