Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Mathematics/2015 February 20

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February 20

Topic on consecutiveness

I believe there is an article, dealing with math, that talks about a similar concept to consecutiveness, but not in the same meaning. Maybe something like that: "it is an adjective which describes something as following in order, but not (necessarily) sequentially". What is this word?174.3.125.23 (talk) 11:14, 20 February 2015 (UTC)

You may be thinking of partial ordering, a generalisation of "consecutiveness" in which an element may have several predecessors and/or several successors. Gandalf61 (talk) 11:38, 20 February 2015 (UTC)

We have a useful List of order structures in mathematics. Partial orderings sound like they may match what you're looking for, but you may also be thinking about inequalities, where some things may be bigger than others, but not directly follow each other numerically. You may also wish to take a quick look at our article on binary relations: if one item follows another, but not necessarily sequentially, this can be expressed as a binary relation. RomanSpa (talk) 12:07, 20 February 2015 (UTC)

Perhaps one of the notions of Successor? We have successor ordinal, successor cardinal, and successor function. SemanticMantis (talk) 15:32, 20 February 2015 (UTC)

It doesn't seem like any of the above, though a link to the page might lie buried in one of those articles. I believe the word also starts with "c-"; it might have something to do with "commutative".174.3.125.23 (talk) 01:38, 22 February 2015 (UTC)