In topology and related areas of mathematics, a subset A of a topological space X is called dense (in X) if every point x in X either belongs to A or is a limit point of A. Informally, for every point in X, the point is either in A or arbitrarily "close" to a member of A — for instance, every real number is either a rational number or has one arbitrarily close to it (see Diophantine approximation).