Peano–Jordan measure explained
In mathematics, the Peano–Jordan measure (also known as the Jordan content) is an extension of the notion of size (length, area, volume) to shapes more complicated than, for example, a triangle, disk, or parallelepiped.
It turns out that for a set to have Jordan measure it should be well-behaved in a certain restrictive sense. For this reason, it is now more common to work with the Lebesgue measure, which is an extension of the Jordan measure to a larger class of sets. Historically speaking, the Jordan measure came first, towards the end of the nineteenth century. For historical reasons, the term Jordan measure is now well-established for this set function, despite the fact that it is not a true measure in its modern definition, since Jordan-measurable sets do not form a σ-algebra. For example, singleton sets
in
each have a Jordan measure of 0, while
, a countable union of them, is not Jordan-measurable.
[1] For this reason, some authors
[2] prefer to use the term .
The Peano–Jordan measure is named after its originators, the French mathematician Camille Jordan, and the Italian mathematician Giuseppe Peano.[3]
Jordan measure of "simple sets"
Jordan measure is first defined on
Cartesian products of
bounded half-open
intervals