linguistic:translation, information:extraction, linguistic:voice_change
History

Wayne Blizard traced multisets back to the very origin of numbers, arguing that "in ancient times, the number n was often represented by a collection of n strokes, tally marks, or units." These and similar collections of objects can be regarded as multisets, because strokes, tally marks, or units are considered indistinguishable. This shows that people implicitly used multisets even before mathematics emerged.

Practical needs for this structure have caused multisets to be rediscovered several times, appearing in literature under different names. For instance, they were important in early AI languages, such as QA4, where they were referred to as bags, a term attributed to Peter Deutsch. A multiset has been also called an aggregate, heap, bunch, sample, weighted set, occurrence set, and fireset (finitely repeated element set).

Although multisets were used implicitly from ancient times, their explicit exploration happened much later. The first known study of multisets is attributed to the Indian mathematician Bhāskarāchārya circa 1150, who described permutations of multisets. The work of Marius Nizolius (1498–1576) contains another early reference to the concept of multisets. Athanasius Kircher found the number of multiset permutations when one element can be repeated. Jean Prestet published a general rule for multiset permutations in 1675. John Wallis explained this rule in more detail in 1685.

Multisets appeared explicitly in the work of Richard Dedekind.

Other mathematicians formalized multisets and began to study them as precise mathematical structures in the 20th century. For example, Whitney (1933) described generalized sets ("sets" whose characteristic functions may take any integer value - positive, negative or zero). Monro (1987) investigated the category Mul of multisets and their morphisms, defining a multiset as a set with an equivalence relation between elements "of the same sort ", and a morphism between multisets as a function which respects sorts. He also introduced a multinumber : a function f (x) from a multiset to the natural numbers, giving the multiplicity of element x in the multiset. Monro argued that the concepts of multiset and multinumber are often mixed indiscriminately, though both are useful.