structural:scholar_edition, information:filtering
Formal definition

Von Neumann cardinal assignment implies that the cardinal number of a finite set is the common ordinal number of all possible well-orderings of that set, and cardinal and ordinal arithmetic (addition, multiplication, power, proper subtraction) then give the same answers for finite numbers. However, they differ for infinite numbers. For example, 2 ω = ω < ω 2 {\displaystyle 2^{\omega }=\omega <\omega ^{2}} in ordinal arithmetic while 2 ℵ 0 > ℵ 0 = ℵ 0 2 {\displaystyle 2^{\aleph _{0}}>\aleph _{0}=\aleph _{0}^{2}} in cardinal arithmetic, although the von Neumann assignment puts ℵ 0 = ω {\displaystyle \aleph _{0}=\omega }. On the other hand, Scott's trick implies that the cardinal number 0 is { ∅ } {\displaystyle \{\emptyset \}}, which is also the ordinal number 1, and this may be confusing. A possible compromise (to take advantage of the alignment in finite arithmetic while avoiding reliance on the axiom of choice and confusion in infinite arithmetic) is to apply von Neumann assignment to the cardinal numbers of finite sets (those which can be well ordered and are not equipotent to proper subsets) and to use Scott's trick for the cardinal numbers of other sets.