Archimedean property


In abstract algebra, the Archimedean property, named after the ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes of Syracuse, is a property held by some groups, fields, and other algebraic structures. Roughly speaking, it is the property of having no infinitely large or infinitely small elements (i.e. no nontrivial infinitesimals). This can be made precise in various contexts, for example, for fields with an absolute value, where the ordered field of real numbers is Archimedean, but the field of p-adic numbers with the p-adic absolute value is non-Archimedean.