Lebesgue measure

In measure theory, a branch of mathematics, the Lebesgue measure, named after French mathematician Henri Lebesgue, is the standard way of assigning a measure to subsets of higher dimensional Euclidean n-spaces. For lower dimensions n = 1, 2, or 3, it coincides with the standard measure of length, area, or volume. In general, it is also called n-dimensional volume, n-volume, hypervolume, or simply volume. It is used throughout real analysis, in particular to define Lebesgue integration. Sets that can be assigned a Lebesgue measure are called Lebesgue-measurable; the measure of the Lebesgue-measurable set A is here denoted by λ(A).

Henri Lebesgue described this measure in the year 1901 which, a year after, was followed up by his description of the Lebesgue integral. Both were published as part of his dissertation in 1902.