 Measure

On a measurable space $(X,\mathcal{F})$, a measure is a function $\mu :\mathcal{F}\to [0,\infty ]$ with $\mu (\varnothing )=0$ and countable additivity: for pairwise disjoint measurable sets $A_n$,Infinite size is permitted. Nonnegativity implies that if measurable sets satisfy $A\subseteq B$, then $\mu (A)\le \mu (B)$: decompose $B$ into $A$ and $B\setminus A$. For overlapping measurable sets, use countable subadditivity rather than adding their full sizes twice.

For example, counting measure gives $\mu (\{a,b,c\})=3$, while a Dirac measure ${\delta }_a$ gives that same set size $1$ if it contains $a$. Under Lebesgue measure, $[0,1/4]\cup [3/4,1]$ has size $1/4+1/4=1/2$. These are all measures, but they answer different questions: how many objects, whether a distinguished object is present, or how much length is occupied.