What is an idempotent operation?

Question

What is an idempotent operation?

Answer 1

An idempotent operation over a set leaves its members unchanged when applied one or more times.

It can be a unary operation like absolute(x) where x belongs to a set of positive integers. Here absolute(absolute(x)) = x.

It can be a binary operation like union of a set with itself would always return the same set.

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