In mathematics, specifically set theory, the Cartesian product of two sets A and B, denoted A×B, is the set of all ordered pairs  where a is in A and b is in B. In terms of set-builder notation, that is

A table can be created by taking the Cartesian product of a set of rows and a set of columns. If the Cartesian product  is taken, the cells of the table contain ordered pairs of the form .

One can similarly define the Cartesian product of n sets, also known as an n-fold Cartesian product, which can be represented by an n-dimensional array, where each element is an n-tuple. An ordered pair is a 2-tuple or couple. More generally still, one can define the Cartesian product of an indexed family of sets.

The Cartesian product is named after René Descartes, whose formulation of analytic geometry gave rise to the concept, which is further generalized in terms of direct product.

Set-theoretic definition
A rigorous definition of the Cartesian product requires a domain to be specified in the set-builder notation. In this case the domain would have to contain the Cartesian product itself. For defining the Cartesian product of the sets  and , one such domain is the set  where  denotes the power set. Then the Cartesian product of the sets  and  would be defined as

Examples

A deck of cards

An illustrative example is the standard 52-card deck. The standard playing card ranks {A, K, Q, J, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2} form a 13-element set. The card suits } form a four-element set. The Cartesian product of these sets returns a 52-element set consisting of 52 ordered pairs, which correspond to all 52 possible playing cards.

 returns a set of the form {(A, ♠), (A, ), (A, ), (A, ♣), (K, ♠), …, (3, ♣), (2, ♠), (2, ), (2, ), (2, ♣)}.

 returns a set of the form {(♠, A), (♠, K), (♠, Q), (♠, J), (♠, 10), …, (♣, 6), (♣, 5), (♣, 4), (♣, 3), (♣, 2)}.

These two sets are distinct, even disjoint, but there is a natural bijection between them, under which (3, ♣) corresponds to (♣, 3) and so on.

A two-dimensional coordinate system

The main historical example is the Cartesian plane in analytic geometry. In order to represent geometrical shapes in a numerical way, and extract numerical information from shapes' numerical representations, René Descartes assigned to each point in the plane a pair of real numbers, called its coordinates. Usually, such a pair's first and second components are called its x and y coordinates, respectively (see picture). The set of all such pairs (i.e., the Cartesian product , with ℝ denoting the real numbers) is thus assigned to the set of all points in the plane.

Most common implementation (set theory)

A formal definition of the Cartesian product from set-theoretical principles follows from a definition of ordered pair. The most common definition of ordered pairs, Kuratowski's definition, is . Under this definition,  is an element of , and  is a subset of that set, where  represents the power set operator. Therefore, the existence of the Cartesian product of any two sets in ZFC follows from the axioms of pairing, union, power set, and specification. Since functions are usually defined as a special case of relations, and relations are usually defined as subsets of the Cartesian product, the definition of the two-set Cartesian product is necessarily prior to most other definitions.

Non-commutativity and non-associativity
Let A, B, C, and D be sets.

The Cartesian product  is not commutative,

because the ordered pairs are reversed unless at least one of the following conditions is satisfied:
 A is equal to B, or
 A or B is the empty set.

For example:
A = {1,2}; B = {3,4}
 A × B = {1,2} × {3,4} = {(1,3), (1,4), (2,3), (2,4)}
 B × A = {3,4} × {1,2} = {(3,1), (3,2), (4,1), (4,2)}

A = B = {1,2}
 A × B = B × A = {1,2} × {1,2} = {(1,1), (1,2), (2,1), (2,2)}

A = {1,2}; B = ∅
 A × B = {1,2} × ∅ = ∅
 B × A = ∅ × {1,2} = ∅

Strictly speaking, the Cartesian product is not associative (unless one of the involved sets is empty).

If for example A = {1}, then  .

Intersections, unions, and subsets

The Cartesian product satisfies the following property with respect to intersections (see middle picture).

In most cases, the above statement is not true if we replace intersection with union (see rightmost picture).

In fact, we have that:

For the set difference, we also have the following identity:

Here are some rules demonstrating distributivity with other operators (see leftmost picture):

where  denotes the absolute complement of A.

Other properties related with subsets are:

Cardinality

The cardinality of a set is the number of elements of the set. For example, defining two sets: } and  Both set A and set B consist of two elements each. Their Cartesian product, written as , results in a new set which has the following elements:
A × B = {(a,5), (a,6), (b,5), (b,6)}.

where each element of A is paired with each element of B, and where each pair makes up one element of the output set.
The number of values in each element of the resulting set is equal to the number of sets whose Cartesian product is being taken; 2 in this case.
The cardinality of the output set is equal to the product of the cardinalities of all the input sets. That is,
|A × B| = |A| · |B|.
In this case, |A × B| = 4

Similarly
|A × B × C| = |A| · |B| · |C|
and so on.

The set  is infinite if either A or B is infinite, and the other set is not the empty set.

Cartesian products of several sets

n-ary Cartesian product
The Cartesian product can be generalized to the n-ary Cartesian product over n sets X1, ..., Xn as the set

of n-tuples. If tuples are defined as nested ordered pairs, it can be identified with . If a tuple is defined as a function on } that takes its value at i to be the ith element of the tuple, then the Cartesian product X1×⋯×Xn is the set of functions

n-ary Cartesian power
The Cartesian square of a set X is the Cartesian product .
An example is the 2-dimensional plane  where R is the set of real numbers: R2 is the set of all points  where x and y are real numbers (see the Cartesian coordinate system).

The  n-ary Cartesian power of a set X, denoted , can be defined as

An example of this is , with R again the set of real numbers, and more generally Rn.

The n-ary Cartesian power of a set X is isomorphic to the space of functions from an n-element set to X. As a special case, the 0-ary Cartesian power of X may be taken to be a singleton set, corresponding to the empty function with codomain X.

Infinite Cartesian products
It is possible to define the Cartesian product of an arbitrary (possibly infinite) indexed family of sets. If I is any index set, and  is a family of sets indexed by I, then the Cartesian product of the sets in  is defined to be

that is, the set of all functions defined on the index set I such that the value of the function at a particular index i is an element of Xi. Even if each of the Xi is nonempty, the Cartesian product may be empty if the axiom of choice, which is equivalent to the statement that every such product is nonempty, is not assumed.  may also be denoted .

For each j in I, the function

defined by  is called the jth projection map.

Cartesian power is a Cartesian product where all the factors Xi are the same set X. In this case,

is the set of all functions from I to X, and is frequently denoted XI. This case is important in the study of cardinal exponentiation. An important special case is when the index set is , the natural numbers: this Cartesian product is the set of all infinite sequences with the ith term in its corresponding set Xi. For example, each element of

can be visualized as a vector with countably infinite real number components. This set is frequently denoted , or .

Other forms

Abbreviated form
If several sets are being multiplied together (e.g., X1, X2, X3, …), then some authors choose to abbreviate the Cartesian product as simply ×Xi.

Cartesian product of functions
If f is a function from X to A and g is a function from Y to B, then their Cartesian product  is a function from  to  with

This can be extended to tuples and infinite collections of functions.
This is different from the standard Cartesian product of functions considered as sets.

Cylinder
Let  be a set and . Then the cylinder of  with respect to  is the Cartesian product  of  and .

Normally,  is considered to be the universe of the context and is left away. For example, if  is a subset of the natural numbers , then the cylinder of  is .

Definitions outside set theory

Category theory
Although the Cartesian product is traditionally applied to sets, category theory provides a more general interpretation of the product of mathematical structures. This is distinct from, although related to, the notion of a Cartesian square in category theory, which is a generalization of the fiber product.

Exponentiation is the right adjoint of the Cartesian product; thus any category with a Cartesian product (and a final object) is a Cartesian closed category.

Graph theory
In graph theory, the Cartesian product of two graphs G and H is the graph denoted by , whose vertex set is the (ordinary) Cartesian product  and such that two vertices (u,v) and (u′,v′) are adjacent in , if and only if  and v is adjacent with v′ in H, or  and u is adjacent with u′ in G. The Cartesian product of graphs is not a product in the sense of category theory. Instead, the categorical product is known as the tensor product of graphs.

See also
 Axiom of power set (to prove the existence of the Cartesian product)
 Binary relation
 Concatenation of sets of strings
 Coproduct
 Cross product
 Direct product of groups
 Empty product
 Euclidean space
 Exponential object
 Finitary relation
 Join (SQL) § Cross join
 Orders on the Cartesian product of totally ordered sets
 Outer product
 Product (category theory)
 Product topology
 Product type
 Ultraproduct

References

External links
 Cartesian Product at ProvenMath
 
 How to find the Cartesian Product, Education Portal Academy

Axiom of choice
Operations on sets